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Published on: December 27, 2018
Long-Lived Emissive Probes for Time-Resolved Photoluminescence Bioimaging and Biosensing
Kenneth Yin Zhang1, Qi Yu1, Huanjie Wei1
1Key Laboratory for Organic Electronics and Information Displays & Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Biosensors, Institute of Advanced Materials (IAM), Jiangsu National Synergetic Innovation Center for Advanced Materials (SICAM), Nanjing University of Posts & Telecommunications , 9 Wenyuan Road, Nanjing 210023, P. R. China.
Abstract:
In this Review article, we systematically summarize the design and applications of various kinds of long-lived emissive probes for bioimaging and biosensing via time-resolved photoluminescence techniques. The probes reviewed, including lanthanides, transition-metal complexes, organic dyes, carbon and silicon nanoparticles, metal clusters, and persistent phosphores, exhibit longer luminescence lifetimes than that of autofluorescence from biological tissue and organs. When these probes are internalized into living cells or animals, time-gated photoluminescence imaging selectively collects long-lived signals for intensity analysis, while photoluminescence lifetime imaging reports the decay details of each pixel. Since the long-lived signals are differentiated from autofluorescence in the time domain, the imaging contrast and sensing sensitivity are remarkably improved. The future prospects and challenges in this rapidly growing field are addressed.
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