Hydrogen-bond-driven self-assembly of chemiluminophore affording long-lasting in vivo imaging
Shuai Xu1, Wenjing Pan2, Lanlan Chen3
1Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery, Hunan Provincial People's Hospital/The First Affiliated Hospital of Hunan Normal University, Changsha, 410005, PR China; State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, PR China; School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, University of Jinan, Jinan, 250022, China.
Abstract:
Developing chemiluminescence probe with a slow kinetic profile, even a constant emission within analytical time, would improve the analytical sensitivity, but still remains challenging. This work reports a novel strategy to afford long-lasting in vivo imaging by developing a self-assembled chemiluminophore HPQCL-Cl via the introduction of the hydrogen-bond-driven self-assembled dye HPQ to Schaap's dioxetane. Compared with classical chemiluminophore HCL, self-assembled HPQCL-Cl was isolated from the physiological environment, thereby lowering its deprotonation and prolonging its half-life. Based on HPQCL-Cl, the long-lasting in vivo imaging of 9L-lacz tumor was achieved by developing a β-gal-responsive probe. Its signals remained constant (<5% change) for about 20 min, which may provide a wide time window for the determination of β-gal. This probe also showed high tumor-to-normal tissue ratio throughout tumor resection, highlighting its potential in image-guided clinical surgery.
