Skip to main content
. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2022 Jul 15.
Published in final edited form as: Bioorg Med Chem. 2021 Jun 7;42:116268. doi: 10.1016/j.bmc.2021.116268

Figure 10. Mechanisms of action of metabolic imaging probes.

Figure 10.

A) Fluorescent sugar analogs are metabolically incorporated into endogenous glycans to enable their detection and tracking via fluorescence. Trehalose is depicted by two linked blue circles. B) Fluorescent and rotor-fluorogenic D-amino acids are metabolically incorporated into peptidoglycan and facilitate the real-time imaging of peptidoglycan biosynthesis. Rotor-fluorogenic D-amino acids turn fluorescent once incorporated into cellular peptidoglycan. C) Fluorophore-quencher probes accessed from sugar analogs become fluorescent upon specific enzyme-catalyzed reactions and allow the direct visualization of enzyme activity during cell wall biosynthesis.