Related Experiment Video
Updated: Nov 22, 2025
Computed Tomography-guided Time-domain Diffuse Fluorescence Tomography in Small Animals for Localization of Cancer Biomarkers
Published on: July 17, 2012
Aggregation-Induced Emission Fluorophore-Based Molecular Beacon for Differentiating Tumor and Normal Cells by
Qinghua Guan1,2, Nan Li3, Leilei Shi4
1School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai 200240, China.
Abstract:
Accurate and nondestructive detection of tumor-related mRNA in living cells is of great significance for tumor diagnosis. The universal technique for imaging mRNA in living cells is nucleic-acid-based fluorescent probes. However, the majority of developed nucleic-acid-based fluorescent probes were only designed to detect the targeted mRNA but could not avoid the interference arising from nuclease or other biological matrices, which results in inevitable false-positive signals. To overcome this dilemma, a new aggregation-induced emission (AIE) fluorophore and the fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) principle were used to establish a novel AIE fluorophore-based molecular beacon (AIE-MB). The AIE fluorophore tetraphenylethylene-quinoxaline (TPEQ) was designed by incorporating quinoxalinone with one typical AIE active luminogen tetraphenylethene (TPE), which could acquire a wide range of excitation wavelength. On this basis, the AIE-MB was designed by labeling two fluorophores: the TPEQ acceptor and an aggregation-caused quenching (ACQ) fluorophore 7-amino-4-methylcoumarin acid (AMCA) donor. On the basis of these two fluorophores, the AIE-MB could exhibit three states: weak fluorescence at primary stage, blue fluorescence (specific signal) generated by pairing with target mRNA in tumor cells, and both blue and green fluorescence (false-positive signal) due to the endogenous degradation in normal cells. Obviously, the specific imaging for target mRNA in tumor cells and the false-positive signal resulting from endogenous degradation in normal cells could be accurately distinguished through the different fluorescence emission. As a result, in contrast to traditional nucleic-acid-based fluorescent probes, the AIE-MB could improve the accuracy of the tumor detection by efficiently differentiating both specific and false-positive signals, which showed potential application value in tumor diagnosis and biomedical research.
