Liu Leijing, Zhang Fengli, Xu Bin, Tian Wenjing
State Key Laboratory of Supramolecular Structure and Materials, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, P. R. China.
J Mater Chem B. 2017 Dec 14;5(46):9197-9203. doi: 10.1039/c7tb02734f. Epub 2017 Nov 17.
Nitric oxide (NO), known as a reactive nitrogen species (RNS), has been considered to be a significant factor in many cell-related biological processes. There is a great desire to develop fluorescent probes that can highly sensitively and selectively detect NO in living cells. Herein, a fluorescent probe, a tetraphenylethene (TPE) derivative TPE-2NH2, with aggregation induced emission (AIE) properties was designed and synthesized. Then silica nanoparticles based on TPE-2NH2 were fabricated for ratiometric detection of NO in vitro with high sensitivity and selectivity. In the presence of NO, the fluorescence of the silica nanoparticles changes from 519 nm (green) to 655 nm (red) because of the chemical reaction between NO and o-phenylenediamine in TPE-2NH2. The silica nanoparticles exhibited very high sensitivity and selectivity towards NO in aqueous buffer, and the response time was as short as 5 minutes. Moreover, the silica nanoparticles can also highly sensitively and selectively respond to NO produced in living cells. When MCF-7 cancer cells were activated by lipopolysaccharides (LPS), which can effectively induce the production of NO, the red emission signal of the silica nanoparticles obviously increased. This demonstrated that the silica nanoparticles showed fine imaging contrast towards NO in MCF-7 cancer cells, which provides a facile tool to detect intracellular NO.
一氧化氮（NO）作为一种活性氮物质（RNS），被认为是许多细胞相关生物过程中的一个重要因素。人们非常希望开发出能够在活细胞中高灵敏度和高选择性地检测NO的荧光探针。在此，设计并合成了一种具有聚集诱导发光（AIE）特性的荧光探针——四苯乙烯（TPE）衍生物TPE-2NH2。然后制备了基于TPE-2NH2的二氧化硅纳米颗粒，用于体外对NO进行高灵敏度和高选择性的比率检测。在NO存在的情况下，由于NO与TPE-2NH2中的邻苯二胺发生化学反应，二氧化硅纳米颗粒的荧光从519nm（绿色）变为655nm（红色）。二氧化硅纳米颗粒在水性缓冲液中对NO表现出非常高的灵敏度和选择性，响应时间短至5分钟。此外，二氧化硅纳米颗粒还能对活细胞中产生的NO进行高灵敏度和高选择性的响应。当MCF-7癌细胞被脂多糖（LPS）激活时，脂多糖可有效诱导NO的产生，此时二氧化硅纳米颗粒的红色发射信号明显增强。这表明二氧化硅纳米颗粒在MCF-7癌细胞中对NO显示出良好的成像对比度，为检测细胞内NO提供了一种简便的工具。
