Little is known about the potential of the C-bridged benzodiazole scaffold for the development of fluorescent biomolecules, so we decided to systematically investigate the fluorescence responses of all benzodiazoles against a broad range of biological analytes under physiological conditions. Diversity-oriented fluorescence libraries have been proven an effective approach for the identification of environmentally-sensitive fluorophores as well as analyte-responding probes [
42]. First, we run a fluorescence response profiling analysis by monitoring the fluorescent intensity changes of 11 C-bridged benzodiazoles against 60 biometabolites including amino acids (asparagine, isoleucine, tyrosine, lysine, tryptophan, alanine, arginine, asparagine, phenylalanine, methionine, proline, valine, glutamine, histidine, leucine, glutamate, serine, glycine and threonine), oxidant and reducing agents (cysteine, homocysteine, glutathione, glutathione disulfide (GSSG), H
2O
2, OCl
‒, •OH,
1O
2, NO, NaSH and •O
2), sugars (arabinose, glucose, fructose, galactose, sucrose, maltose, mannose and glycogen), steroids (estriol, chloric acid, dexamethasone, estrone,
β-estradiol, 4-androsterene-3,17-dione), metal ions (Fe
3+, Fe
2+, Cu
2+, Cu
+, Ca
2+, Mg
2+, Zn
+, Hg
2+, Sn
2+ and Pd
2+), nucleic acids (DNA) and proteins (bovine serum albumin, human serum albumin, lysozyme and peroxidase). To maximise the reliability of our primary screening, we configured the assay conditions with four serial concentrations for each analyte in these ranges: 0.1–100 μmol·L
−1 for steroids, 2−2000 μg∙mL
–1 for proteins, 0.31–310 pg∙μL
–1 for DNA and 1–1000 μmol·L
−1 for all other analytes.