State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Bio-Sensing and Chemometrics, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China.
Analyst. 2017 Jul 10;142(14):2624-2630. doi: 10.1039/c7an00575j.
In recent years, many activatable fluorescent probes have been developed for hNQO1 detection. However, most of the reported fluorescent probes are susceptible to the interferences of endogenous fluorescence and have the drawback of inadequate penetration depth. Very recently, researchers have reported a two-photon excitation (TPE) fluorescent probe for hNQO1 detection. Nevertheless, this probe only exhibits a compromised signal-to-background ratio, and has not been applied to image hNQO1 in living tissues. Herein, a novel TPE fluorescent probe, trimethyl locked quinone caged Acedan (QCA-P), has been developed for hNQO1 detection and imaging in living cells and tissues. QCA-P displays over 25-fold enhancement in fluorescence intensity toward hNQO1 with a Stokes shift over 100 nm in one-photon excitation and exhibits a very low detection limit of 5.6 ng mL. The imaging experiments performed in tumour cells and tissue slices using QCA-P demonstrate that QCA-P could image the endogenous hNQO1 with high selectivity and sensitivity with a TPE probing depth of 120 μm. Thus, our probe may have great potential for use in cancer diagnosis and image-guided surgery.
近年来，已经开发出许多用于 hNQO1 检测的可激活荧光探针。然而，大多数报道的荧光探针容易受到内源性荧光的干扰，并且穿透深度不足。最近，研究人员报道了一种用于 hNQO1 检测的双光子激发（TPE）荧光探针。然而，该探针仅表现出妥协的信号背景比，并且尚未应用于活体组织中 hNQO1 的成像。在此，开发了一种新型 TPE 荧光探针，三甲基锁定醌笼 Acetan（QCA-P），用于活细胞和组织中 hNQO1 的检测和成像。QCA-P 对 hNQO1 的荧光强度增强超过 25 倍，在单光子激发下的斯托克斯位移超过 100nm，并具有低至 5.6ngmL 的检测限。使用 QCA-P 在肿瘤细胞和组织切片中进行的成像实验表明，QCA-P 可以用 TPE 探测深度为 120μm 对内源性 hNQO1 进行高选择性和高灵敏度成像。因此，我们的探针在癌症诊断和图像引导手术中可能具有很大的应用潜力。
