Li Xuejing, Zeng Erzao, Di Huixia, Li Qiang, Ji Jingwei, Yang Jie, Liu Dingbin
College of Chemistry, Research Center for Analytical Sciences, State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology, and Tianjin Key, Laboratory of Molecular Recognition and Biosensing, Nankai University, Tianjin, 300071, China.
Adv Biosyst. 2019 Jul;3(7):e1900046. doi: 10.1002/adbi.201900046. Epub 2019 May 30.
Profiling cellular biomarkers without the interference of endogenous signals could facilitate the investigation of complex intracellular biological events and provide new possibilities for precision disease diagnosis. Herein, a surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) probe with a high signal-to-background ratio (SBR) for cellular biomarker imaging is constructed. The probes are prepared by incorporating Prussian blue (PB) with porous gold nanoparticles (p-Au NPs). Due to their rich built-in Raman hotspots, the p-Au NPs are excellent SERS substrates that can significantly amplify the signals of the incorporated PB. In parallel, PB shows a single peak in the cellular silent region, where the signals from the probes and endogenous molecules can be completely resolved without the need of complex spectral unmixing. As a consequence, the combination of probe signal enhancement and background elimination endows the SERS probes with an extremely high SBR. To evaluate their performance in biomarker imaging, the high-SBR SERS probes are utilized to profile folic acids at a single-cell level. This background-free, high-precision imaging technique is conducive to early diagnosis and therapeutic response of cancer that is of great importance in clinical settings.
在不受到内源性信号干扰的情况下分析细胞生物标志物，有助于对复杂的细胞内生物学事件进行研究，并为精准疾病诊断提供新的可能性。在此，构建了一种用于细胞生物标志物成像的具有高信噪比（SBR）的表面增强拉曼散射（SERS）探针。这些探针是通过将普鲁士蓝（PB）与多孔金纳米颗粒（p-Au NPs）结合制备而成。由于其丰富的内置拉曼热点，p-Au NPs是出色的SERS基底，能够显著放大所结合PB的信号。同时，PB在细胞静默区域呈现单峰，在此区域，来自探针和内源性分子的信号能够完全分辨，无需复杂的光谱解混。因此，探针信号增强与背景消除相结合，赋予了SERS探针极高的SBR。为评估其在生物标志物成像中的性能，利用高SBR的SERS探针在单细胞水平分析叶酸。这种无背景、高精度的成像技术有利于癌症的早期诊断和治疗反应评估，在临床环境中具有重要意义。
