Toxicant–Probe Unity in Fluorotoxicology: A Conceptual Framework, Aggregation-State Taxonomy, and Research Agenda

Intrinsic-fluorescence Fluorotoxicology is defined here as the study of toxicant-induced perturbations through the intrinsic fluorescence of the toxicant itself, rather than through externally added fluorescent probes.This framework is complementary to, not a replacement for, probe-based Fluorotoxicology.The field has long been organized around a "toxicantprobe separation" assumption: the toxicant is treated as a non-luminescent object to be measured, while an exogenous probe is treated as an external observational tool belonging to a separate domain.This assumption has allowed mechanistic toxicology and fluorescence detection to develop in parallel, but it has limited their mutual generation of knowledge within a single framework.We propose Toxicant-Probe Unity (TPU) as an organizing principle for intrinsic-fluorescence Fluorotoxicology.Its central claim is that, for intrinsically fluorescent toxicants, the toxicant molecule