Lipophilic Red-Emitting Carbon Dots for Detecting and Tracking Lipid Droplets in Live Cells

Lipid droplets (LDs), a dynamic organelle, are of vital importance in regulating the storage of neutral lipids and energy homeostasis. The aberrant expression of LDs is found to be highly associated with diverse metabolic diseases. Thus, detecting and monitoring LDs are essential to study the pathological and physiological processes of LDs in living bodies. However, it remains challenging to obtain suitable imaging probes to track LDs in vivo. Fortunately, the emergence of carbon dots (CDs), which are fluorescent nanomaterials with good biocompatibility and high stability, has provided us an unprecedented choice. In this work, CDs were synthesized via a solvothermal treatment of commercial reagents, 3-dimethylaminophenol. Interestingly, the prepared CDs show an intense red emission in non-hydrogen-bonding solution and have strong LD-targeting ability without any postmodification of ligands. Moreover, due to their low phototoxicity and excellent photostability, CDs were successfully applied to track the dynamics of LDs in live cells and image LDs in different cell lines and lipid-rich tissues. Overall, this work here proposed an LD-specific red-emitting CD probe, which will be of great value for learning more about LD-associated behaviors and diseases.