Tailoring the positive and negative solvatochromism for chalcone analogues to detect heterozygous protein co-aggregation.

It is rare for one fluorophore scaffold to harbor both positive and negative solvatochromism. Herein, we tailor chalcone analogues to achieve both positive- and negative-polarity sensitivity of fluorescence intensity. We explore two chalcones of opposite solvatochromism to simultaneously detect the co-aggregation of wild-type and mutant superoxide dismutase that cause amyotrophic lateral sclerosis disease.