Chirality enriched (12,1) and (11,3) single-walled carbon nanotubes for biological imaging

The intrinsic band gap photoluminescence of semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) makes them promising biological imaging probes in the second near-infrared (NIR-II, 1.0-1.4 μm) window. Thus far, SWNTs used for biological applications have been a complex mixture of metallic and semiconducting species with random chiralities, preventing simultaneous resonant excitation of all semiconducting nanotubes and emission at a single well-defined wavelength. Here, we developed a simple gel filtration method to enrich semiconducting (12,1) and (11,3) SWNTs with identical resonance absorption at ~808 nm and emission near ~1200 nm. The chirality sorted SWNTs showed ~5-fold higher photoluminescence intensity under resonant excitation of 808 nm than unsorted SWNTs on a per-mass basis. Real-time in vivo video imaging of whole mouse body and tumor vessels was achieved using a ~6-fold lower injected dose of (12,1) and (11,3) SWNTs (~3 μg per mouse or ~0.16 mg/kg of body weight vs 1.0 mg/kg for unsorted SWNTs) than a previous heterogeneous mixture, demonstrating the first resonantly excited and chirality separated SWNTs for biological imaging.