Recent Development of Advanced Fluorescent Molecular Probes for Organelle-Targeted Cell Imaging

Abstract

Fluorescent molecular probes are very powerful tools that have been generally applied in cell imaging in the research fields of biology, pathology, pharmacology, biochemistry, and medical science. In the last couple of decades, numerous molecular probes endowed with high specificity to particular organelles have been designed to illustrate intracellular images in more detail at the subcellular level. Nowadays, the development of cell biology has enabled the investigation process to go deeply into cells, even at the molecular level. Therefore, probes that can sketch a particular organelle’s location while responding to certain parameters to evaluate intracellular bioprocesses are under urgent demand. It is significant to understand the basic ideas of organelle properties, as well as the vital substances related to each unique organelle, for the design of probes with high specificity and efficiency. In this review, we summarize representative multifunctional fluorescent molecular probes developed in the last decade. We focus on probes that can specially target nuclei, mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulums, and lysosomes. In each section, we first briefly introduce the significance and properties of different organelles. We then discuss how probes are designed to make them highly organelle-specific. Finally, we also consider how probes are constructed to endow them with additional functions to recognize particular physical/chemical signals of targeted organelles. Moreover, a perspective on the challenges in future applications of highly specific molecular probes in cell imaging is also proposed. We hope that this review can provide researchers with additional conceptual information about developing probes for cell imaging, assisting scientists interested in molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry to accelerate their scientific studies.

Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship of Fluorescent Probes and Their Intracellular Localizations

“…Such a lipophilic environment of ER can facilitate the accumulation of lipophilic molecules, such as the pentafluorophenyl and phenoxazine groups [28,39]. Moreover, the ER membrane proteins that contain thiol moieties may react with the pentafluorophenyl group through a halogen-substituted reaction [40,41]. On the other hand, the (fraction of rotatable bonds) was notably higher in Golgi-specific probes (Figure 3c).…”

Quantitative imaging and semiotic phenotyping of mitochondrial network morphology in live human cells

“…Although our procedure was mainly tested on live human skin cells, live cell images (taken through fluorescence imaging techniques like confocal microscopy or two-photon excitation microscopy) can be collected from virtually any type of adherent cells before segmentation and automatic processing. Last, thanks to the availability of specific fluorescent probes, it might be interesting to adapt our procedure and tools to study the morphology and dynamics of other organelles including lysosomes, the Golgi apparatus and the endoplasmic reticulum [ 88 , 89 ].…”

A biocompatible NIR squaraine dye and dye-antibody conjugates for versatile long-term in vivo fluorescence bioimaging

“…1,2 Among the various imaging techniques available, fluorescent probe-based bioimaging shows great promise due to its ability to enable real-time observations with exceptional sensitivity, high resolution, and non-invasiveness. 3,4…”

“…1,2 Among the various imaging techniques available, fluorescent probe-based bioimaging shows great promise due to its ability to enable real-time observations with exceptional sensitivity, high resolution, and non-invasiveness. 3,4 Fluorescent probes offer valuable insights into the role of biomolecules and can be designed to target and study specific organelles in both healthy and diseased conditions. 5 Over the past decade, the development of highly effective fluorescence imaging probes, including quantum dots (QDs), rare-earth fluorescent crystals, organic dyes, fluorescent proteins/peptide-conjugates, nanomaterials, and carbon dots, has garnered significant interest.…”