Greenish yellow synthetic dye quinoline yellow (Qy) is widely used in food and pharmaceutical industries. However, this dye may lead to health and environmental problems. Therefore, investigating how Qy interacts with biological macromolecules is of great interest. In this work, Qy was found to be a novel AIEgen having strong solid-state emission and water-soluble merits. Adding tetrahydrofuran into Qy’s aqueous solution would induce Qy to form nanoaggregates which increase Qy’s fluorescence intensity. Moreover, we found Qy was able to interact with typical biological macromolecules, such as chitosan, BSA, and DNA, and quench these biomolecules’ intrinsic fluorescence. Therefore, chitosan was picked as a probe for Qy detection. The results showed that chitosan could detect Qy in the presence of interfering ions, other dye, sucrose, as well as in acidic environment. Finally, chitosan was used to determine the quantity of Qy in orange juice and wine. This is the first report of AIEgen found in food colorants and AIE phenomenon was wisely harnessed to visualize molecular interactions between Qy and biological macromolecules, as well as to detect Qy in the beverage.

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