Facile construction of AIE-based FRET nanoprobe for ratiometric imaging of hypochlorite in live cells

Insights into AIE materials: A focus on biomedical applications of fluorescence

“…As is shown in Figure 1, AIE fluorophores exhibit bright fluorescence in the aggregated state but very weak fluorescence in good solvent, making them ideal "turn-on" fluorescent probes for bioanalysis (Chen et al, 2020a;Huang et al, 2020a;Li et al, 2020a;Yang et al, 2020a;Zhang et al, 2020b;Korzec et al, 2020). With sufficient special and unique optical properties, including their simple molecular structure (Pratihar et al, 2020), high SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) (Xu et al, 2020a), high luminescence efficiency (Ma et al, 2020a;Fei et al, 2020;Leng et al, 2020), excellent photostability Mondal et al, 2020a;Wei et al, 2020), and biocompatibility (Xu et al, 2020b;Zhu et al, 2020), AIE fluorescent probes have been widely used as fluorescent components of molecular probes and nanoprobes for biomedical applications in clinical examination and therapy as well as in biological sensing (Gao et al, 2020b;Zhao et al, 2020b;Xu et al, 2020c;Su et al, 2020) and in vivo theranostics.…”

“…Aggregation-induced emission effect: fluorescence photographs of silole molecules in THF/water mixtures under UV light (Dong et al, 2020a).…”

“…The pattern of manifestation is also important for AIEgens to improve their performance. Synthetic AIE materials such as metal nanoparticles (Munirathnappa et al, 2020;Wu et al, 2020), nonconventional polymers (Dong et al, 2020b;Ma H. et al, 2020b;Yang et al, 2020b;Huang et al, 2020c;Zhang et al, 2020f;Xue et al, 2020), and nanodots (Dong et al, 2020a;Crucho et al, 2020) are generally free of aromatic building blocks and conjugated structures. These synthetic AIEgens generally display concentration-enhanced emission and aggregation-induced emission (AIE) characteristics.…”

“…Nanoparticles with AIEgens hold tremendous potential as a tracer material, for they can penetrate biotic tissues with no damage. AIE-based fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) nanoparticles ( Nie et al, 2020a ) were developed to recognize ClO − in living cells ( Figure 9 ). Different from common FRET-based nanosensors, the NPs were prepared via facile co-assembly strategy in water combining amphiphilic tetraphenylethene with thienyl-diketopyrrolopyrrole.…”

“…Over the past several decades, the discovery and design of small organic molecules capable of fluorescence imaging have become a rapidly expanding area of research (Maity et al, 2015;Jia and Wu, 2020a;Zhang et al, 2020a;Younis et al, 2020;Zhu et al, 2020), particularly owing to their possible practical applications in environmental monitoring, tissue engineering Song et al, 2020;Zeng et al, 2020), and medical examination and treatments (Hu et al, 2020a;Jia and Wu, 2020b;Yu et al, 2020). As a powerful tool for tracing, demonstrating, and analyzing biomolecules such as esters (Cai et al, 2020), carbohydrates (Qu et al, 2020), peptides (Gao et al, 2020a), enzymes (Dong et al, 2020a;Zhao et al, 2020a), and nucleotides (Zhang et al, 2020b), fluorescent biosensors provide deep insight into the complicated in vivo chemical, biological, and physiological processes (Wang et al, 2019) to explore authentic pathogenesis and precise diagnosis. Under these circumstances, the research and development of fluorescent biosensors with superior performance are significant.…”