Yan-Ping Shi, Jun-Li Yang and colleagues at the Lanzhou Institute for Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed a sensitive detection for α-glucosidase activity in natural product extracts or blood serum. They used 4-hydroxyphenyl-α-D-glucopyranosyl, which reacts to hydroquinone after cleavage by α-glucosidase, to form orange-red or yellow fluorescent silicon-containing nanoparticles (Si CNPs) in aqueous solution with the silylating reagent 3(2-aminoethylamino)propyl-dimethoxymethylsilane.  Using fluorescence or absorbance measurement, they were able to quantitatively detect α-glucosidase inhibitors or α-glucosidase activity in serum with high sensitivity using this method.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.1c03210