Rhodamine 123 is a chemical compound and a

dye Juan de Guillebon, better known by his stage name DyE, is a French musician. He is known for the music video of the single "Fantasy Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction that involves supernatural or Magic (supernatural), magical ele ...

. It is often used as a tracer dye within water to determine the rate and direction of flow and transport. Rhodamine dyes

fluoresce Fluorescence is one of two kinds of photoluminescence, the emission of light by a substance that has absorbed light or other electromagnetic radiation. When exposed to ultraviolet radiation, many substances will glow (fluoresce) with color ...

and can thus be detected easily and inexpensively with instruments called

fluorometer A fluorometer, fluorimeter or fluormeter is a device used to measure parameters of visible spectrum fluorescence: its intensity and wavelength distribution of emission spectrum after excitation by a certain spectrum of light. These parameters ...

s. Rhodamine dyes are used extensively in biotechnology applications such as

fluorescence microscopy A fluorescence microscope is an optical microscope that uses fluorescence instead of, or in addition to, scattering, reflection, and attenuation or absorption, to study the properties of organic or inorganic substances. A fluorescence micro ...

flow cytometry Flow cytometry (FC) is a technique used to detect and measure the physical and chemical characteristics of a population of cells or particles. In this process, a sample containing cells or particles is suspended in a fluid and injected into the ...

fluorescence correlation spectroscopy Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) is a statistical analysis, via time correlation, of stationary fluctuations of the fluorescence intensity. Its theoretical underpinning originated from L. Onsager's regression hypothesis. The analysis ...

and

ELISA The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) (, ) is a commonly used analytical biochemistry assay, first described by Eva Engvall and Peter Perlmann in 1971. The assay is a solid-phase type of enzyme immunoassay (EIA) to detect the presence of ...

. Rhodamine fluorescence can also be used as a measure of membrane polarization in live cell assays both within mitochondria and with bacteria. This use relies on the fact that rhodamine 123 accumulates in membranes in a manner which is dependent on membrane polarization. The absorption of rhodamine 123 peaks around 505 nm and luminescence is tunable around 560 nm when used as a

laser dye file:Coherent 899 dye laser.jpg, Close-up of a table-top dye laser using Rhodamine 6G as active medium. file:rhodamine 6G.svg, Molecular structure of Rhodamine 6G, perhaps the best known laser dye. A Laser dye is a dye used as laser medium in a dy ...

. Its luminescence

quantum yield In particle physics, the quantum yield (denoted ) of a radiation-induced process is the number of times a specific event occurs per photon absorbed by the system. \Phi(\lambda)=\frac Applications Fluorescence spectroscopy The fluorescence ...

is 0.90.R. F. Kubin and A. N. Fletcher, "Fluorescence quantum yields of some rhodamine dyes.
J. Luminescence 27 (1982) 455
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References

See also