Ambiphilic probe with a polar, environmentally-sensitive dansyl fluorophore attached to a long chain fatty acid. The polar dansyl headgroup partitions to the surface of lipid bilayer membranes while the fatty acid portion embeds into lipid bilayers or can attach to fatty acid carrier protein lipidic environments.
DAUDA has been found that dansyl-11-aminoundecanoic acid exhibits up to a 60-fold fluorescence enhancement and a shift to shorter emission wavelengths on binding to certain proteins (EX 335 nm; EM 519 nm). This property has been exploited to analyze fatty acid binding proteins and also to develop several fluorometric lipase assays, including phospholipase assays based on competitive fatty acid displacement from fatty acid binding proteins.