Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, P. R. China.
Key Laboratory for Organic Electronics and Information Displays, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210023, P. R. China.
ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2020 May 6;12(18):20281-20286. doi: 10.1021/acsami.0c03769. Epub 2020 Apr 21.
Traditional organic fluorophores generally have hydrophobic conjugated backbones and exhibit an aggregation-caused quenching emission property, which limits greatly their applications in the biological field. Aggregation-induced emission (AIE) fluorophores can breakthrough this shortcoming and are more promising in biological imaging. In this paper, we synthesized three novel donor-acceptor-donor-type second near-infrared (NIR-II) fluorophores and studied their geometric and electronic structures and photophysical properties by both theoretical and experimental studies. All the three fluorophores had typical AIE characteristics, and their emission wavelength spanned the traditional near-infrared and NIR-II regions. They exhibited much stronger fluorescence after being encapsulated in polymer nanoparticles (NPs) than in solutions, and the fluorophore-loaded NPs had desirable biosafety and significant tumor accumulation, indicating that they have great application potentials in tumor detection.
传统的有机荧光团通常具有疏水性共轭骨架，并表现出聚集诱导猝灭发射性质，这极大地限制了它们在生物领域的应用。聚集诱导发光（AIE）荧光团可以突破这一缺点，在生物成像中更有前途。在本文中，我们合成了三种新型给体-受体-给体型近红外二区（NIR-II）荧光团，并通过理论和实验研究研究了它们的几何和电子结构以及光物理性质。所有三种荧光团都具有典型的 AIE 特性，其发射波长涵盖了传统的近红外和 NIR-II 区域。它们在封装在聚合物纳米粒子（NPs）中后比在溶液中表现出更强的荧光，并且负载荧光团的 NPs 具有良好的生物安全性和显著的肿瘤积累，表明它们在肿瘤检测中有很大的应用潜力。
