Circularly polarised luminescence laser scanning confocal microscopy to study live cell chiral molecular interactions

Abstract

The molecular machinery of life is founded on chiral building blocks, but no experimental technique is currently available to distinguish or monitor chiral systems in live cell bio-imaging studies. Luminescent chiral molecules encode a unique optical fingerprint within emitted circularly polarized light (CPL) carrying information about the molecular environment, conformation, and binding state. Here, we present a CPL Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope (CPL-LSCM) capable of simultaneous chiroptical contrast based live-cell imaging of endogenous and engineered CPL-active cellular probes. Further, we demonstrate that CPL-active probes can be activated using two-photon excitation, with complete CPL spectrum recovery. The combination of these two milestone results empowers the multidisciplinary imaging community, allowing the study of chiral interactions on a sub-cellular level in a new (chiral) light.

Liquid crystal-templated chiral nanomaterials: from chiral plasmonics to circularly polarized luminescence

“…By using novel chiral soft templates, nanoscale luminescent building blocks are able to self-organize into chiral luminescent nanomaterials exhibiting significantly enhanced circularly polarized luminescence 28,[57][58][59][60][61] . Thanks to their promising photophysical properties, chiral luminescent nanomaterials have attracted significant attention in diverse areas, such as biological science 62 , 3D display 63 , spintronics 64,65 , enantioselective photochemistry 36,66 and information encryption 67,68 . Among the different chiral soft templates, liquidcrystalline soft templates are highly attractive for guiding the self-assembly of nanoscale functional building blocks into high-order chiral nanomaterials due to their inherent long-range ordered molecular assemblies that couple liquid fluidity with crystal ordering from molecular to macroscopic hierarchical levels [69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84] .…”

Highly contorted superhelicene hits near-infrared circularly polarized luminescence

“…The combination of the optical and chiroptical properties, makes this distorted superhelicene a great candidate for its use as near-infrared (NIR) chiral luminescent materials for the development of new optoelectronic devices. 58…”

Near‐Infrared Circularly Polarised Luminescence from Helically Extended Chiral N,N,O,O‐Boron Chelated Dipyrromethenes

“…[9], [10] Further structural modification, to introduce water solubility, for example by inclusion of PEGylated or sulfonated substituents is anticipated to be possible via the meso-ester group or by substitution at the 2and 6-positions of the BODIPY core. Additional elaboration to increase the two photon absorption cross-section, for example by additional π-extension of the conjugated system, might make these chiral NIR emitters suitable for multiphoton microscopy and cell imaging [21] and is the subject of further investigations.…”