Glyphosate is a widely used broad-spectrum herbicide in agriculture and horticulture to control a variety of weeds and undesirable plants. However, the excessive use of glyphosate has raised a number of environmental and human health concerns. It is urgent to develop tools to detect of glyphosate. Herein, a novel dual-signal probe CCU-Cu2+ was designed which synthesized on the basis of CCU. CCU exhibited excellent selectivity and great sensitivity for Cu2+ which were based on both fluorescence “turn–off” reaction and comparative color visualisation methods. By the strong chelating ability of glyphosate on Cu2+, the CCU-Cu2+ complex was applied to glyphosate detection in practical samples. The experimental results in vitro showed that CCU-Cu2+ complex was highly selective, rapid, with a low detection limit (1.6 μM), and could be recognised by the naked eye in the detection of glyphosate. Based on the excellent properties of the CCU-Cu2+ complex, we also constructed a smartphone-assisted detection sensing system for glyphosate detection, which has the advantages of precision, sensitivity, and high interference immunity. Moreover, CCU-Cu2+ complex was also successfully employed for exogenous glyphosate imaging in living cells. These characteristics demonstrated that CCU-Cu2+ hold significant potential for detection and imaging of glyphosate in bio-systems.

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