Ouyang Xiangyuan, Jia Nan, Luo Jing, Li Le, Xue Jiangshan, Bu Huaiyu, Xie Gang, Wan Ying
Xi'an Key Laboratory of Functional Supramolecular Structure and Materials, Key Laboratory of Synthetic and Natural Functional Molecule of Ministry of Education, College of Chemistry & Materials Science, Northwest University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710127, P. R. China.
Key Laboratory of Resource Biology and Biotechnology in Western China (Ministry of Education), College of Life Sciences, Northwest University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710069, PR China.
JACS Au. 2023 Sep 6;3(9):2566-2577. doi: 10.1021/jacsau.3c00365. eCollection 2023 Sep 25.
Metal nanoclusters (NCs) have emerged as a promising class of fluorescent probes for cellular imaging due to their high resistance to photobleaching and low toxicity. Nevertheless, their widespread use in clinical diagnosis is limited by their unstable intracellular fluorescence. In this study, we develop an intracellularly biosynthesized fluorescent probe, DNA nanoribbon-gold NCs (DNR/AuNCs), for long-term cellular tracking. Our results show that DNR/AuNCs exhibit a 4-fold enhancement of intracellular fluorescence intensity compared to free AuNCs. We also investigated the mechanism underlying the fluorescence enhancement of AuNCs by DNRs. Our findings suggest that the higher synthesis efficiency and stability of AuNCs in the lysosome may contribute to their fluorescence enhancement, which enables long-term (up to 15 days) fluorescence imaging of cancer cells (enhancement of ∼60 times compared to free AuNCs). Furthermore, we observe similar results with other metal NCs, confirming the generality of the DNR-assisted biosynthesis approach for preparing highly bright and stable fluorescent metal NCs for cancer cell imaging.
金属纳米团簇（NCs）因其对光漂白具有高抗性且毒性低，已成为一类有前景的用于细胞成像的荧光探针。然而，它们在临床诊断中的广泛应用受到其细胞内荧光不稳定的限制。在本研究中，我们开发了一种细胞内生物合成的荧光探针，即DNA纳米带-金纳米团簇（DNR/AuNCs），用于长期细胞追踪。我们的结果表明，与游离金纳米团簇相比，DNR/AuNCs的细胞内荧光强度增强了4倍。我们还研究了DNR增强金纳米团簇荧光的潜在机制。我们的研究结果表明，金纳米团簇在溶酶体中更高的合成效率和稳定性可能有助于其荧光增强，这使得能够对癌细胞进行长期（长达15天）的荧光成像（与游离金纳米团簇相比增强约60倍）。此外，我们用其他金属纳米团簇观察到了类似的结果，证实了DNR辅助生物合成方法对于制备用于癌细胞成像的高亮度和稳定荧光金属纳米团簇的通用性。
