Color-Switchable Nanosilicon Fluorescent Probes

Autor: Huai Chen, Jiang Xu, Yaping Wang, Da Wang, Raquel Ferrer-Espada, Yutong Wang, Jingjian Zhou, Adrián Pedrazo-Tardajos, Mei Yang, Jia-Heng Tan, Xiaoyu Yang, Lei Zhang, Ilya Sychugov, Shoudeng Chen, Sara Bals, Johan Paulsson, Zhenyu Yang
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: ACS nano
ISSN: 1936-086X
1936-0851
Popis: Fluorescent probes are vital to cell imaging by allowing specific parts of cells to be visualized and quantified. Color-switchable probes (CSPs), with tunable emission wavelength upon contact with specific targets, are particularly powerful because they not only eliminate the need to wash away all unbound probe but also allow for internal controls of probe concentrations, thereby facilitating quantification. Several such CSPs exist and have proven very useful, but not for all key cellular targets. Here we report a pioneering CSP for in situ cell imaging using aldehydefunctionalized silicon nanocrystals (SiNCs) that switch their intrinsic photoluminescence from red to blue quickly when interacting with amino acids in live cells. Though conventional probes often work better in cell-free extracts than in live cells, the SiNCs display the opposite behavior and function well and fast in universal cell lines at 37 ? while requiring much higher temperature in extracts. Furthermore, the SiNCs only disperse in cytoplasm not nucleus, and their fluorescence intensity correlated linearly with the concentration of fed amino acids. We believe these nanosilicon probes will be promising tools to visualize distribution of amino acids and potentially quantify amino acid related processes in live cells.
Databáze: OpenAIRE