Facile preparation and biological imaging of luminescent polymeric nanoprobes with aggregation-induced emission characteristics through Michael addition reaction

Abstract

Water dispersion aggregation-induced emission (AIE) dyes based nanomaterials have recently attracted increasing attention in the biomedical fields because of their unique optical properties, outstanding performance as imaging and therapeutic agents. The methods to conjugate hydrophilic polymers with AIE dyes to solve the hydrophobic nature of AIE dyes and makeS them widely used in biomedicine, which have been extensively explored and paid great effort previously. Although great advance has been made in the fabrication and biomedical applications of AIE-active polymeric nanoprobes, facile and efficient strategies for fabrication of biodegradable AIE-active nanoprobes are still high desirable. In this work, amphiphilic biodegradable fluorescent organic nanoparticles (PLL-TPE-O-E FONs) have been fabricated for the first time by conjugation of AIE dye tetraphenylethene acrylate (TPE-O-E) with Poly-l-Lysine (PLL) through a facile one-step Michael addition reaction, which was carried out under rather mild conditions, included air atmosphere, near room temperature and absent of metal catalysts or hazardous reagents. Due to the unique AIE properties, these amphiphilic copolymers tend to self-assemble into high luminescent water dispersible nanoparticles with size range from 400 to 600nm. Laser scanning microscope and cytotoxicity results revealed that PLL-TPE-O-E FONs can be internalized into cytoplasm with negative cytotoxicity, which implied that PLL-TPE-O-E FONs are promising for biological applications.

Keywords: Aggregation-induced emission; Amphiphilic polymers; Biological imaging; Michael addition reaction; Poly-l-Lysine.