Issue 47, 2020

AIE-based nanoaggregate tracker: high-fidelity visualization of lysosomal movement and drug-escaping processes

Abstract

High-fidelity imaging and long-term visualization of lysosomes are crucial for their functional evaluation, related disease detection and active drug screening. However, commercial aggregation-caused quenching probes are not conducive to precise lysosomal imaging because of their inherent drawbacks, like easy diffusion, short emission and small Stokes shift, let alone their long-term tracing due to rapid photobleaching. Herein we report a novel aggregation-induced emission (AIE)-based TCM-PI nanoaggregate tracker for direct visualization of lysosomes based on the building block of tricyano-methylene-pyridine (TCM), wherein introduced piperazine (PI) groups behave as targeting units to lysosomes upon protonation, and the self-assembled nanostructure contributes to fast endocytosis for enhanced targeting ability as well as extended retention time for long-term imaging. The piperazine-stabilized TCM-PI nanoaggregate shifts the emission maximum to 677 nm in an aqueous environment, and falls within the desirable NIR region with a large Stokes shift of 162 nm, thereby greatly reducing biological fluorescent background interference. In contrast with the commercially available LysoTracker Red, the essential AIE characteristic of high photostability can guarantee three-dimensional high-fidelity tracing with low photobleaching, and little diffusion from lysosomes, and especially overcome the AIE bottleneck to target specificity. Consequently, the AIE-based nanoaggregate tracker successfully achieves the high-fidelity and long-term tracing of lysosomal movement and even monitors the drug-escaping process from lysosomes to cell nuclei, which provides a potential tool to benefit drug screening.

Graphical abstract: AIE-based nanoaggregate tracker: high-fidelity visualization of lysosomal movement and drug-escaping processes

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
29 Jūl. 2020
Accepted
26 Aug. 2020
First published
28 Aug. 2020
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2020,11, 12755-12763

AIE-based nanoaggregate tracker: high-fidelity visualization of lysosomal movement and drug-escaping processes

Z. Liu, Q. Wang, Z. Zhu, M. Liu, X. Zhao and W. Zhu, Chem. Sci., 2020, 11, 12755 DOI: 10.1039/D0SC04156D

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements