Tetramethylrhodamine is an essential scaffold of azide probe in detecting cellular acrolein.

Tetramethylrhodamine (TAMRA)-phenyl azide is a chemical probe used to detect intracellular acrolein directly in live cells. Herein, we demonstrated that TAMRA is the optimum fluorophore for the probe. TAMRA-phenyl azide was used to reveal that high levels of acrolein are generated in a variety of breast cancer cells, regardless of the tumor subtype. These findings corroborate the analysis presented in our previous report, in which TAMRA-phenyl azide was used to label breast cancer tissues resected from breast cancer patients. Because high levels of acrolein were generated in all cancer cell types, we believe that acrolein detection may be useful as a general method for labeling cancerous tissues.