Furan Donor for NIR-II Molecular Fluorophores with Enhanced Bioimaging Performance

作者：Liu, Chunchen; Li, Mengfei; Ma, Huilong; Hu, Zhubin; Wang, Xinyuan; Ma, Rui; Jiang, Yingying; Sun, Haitao^*; Zhu, Shoujun^*; Liang, Yongye^*

来源：Research, 2023, 2023: 0039.

DOI：10.34133/research.0039

• NIR-II molecular fluorophores
• donor engineering
• furan
• cyclic side chains
• biological imaging

The second near-infrared (NIR-II, 1000-1700 nm) molecular fluorophores containing donor-acceptor-donor (D-A-D) conjugated backbone have attracted substantial attention due to their outstanding advantages, such as stable emission and facilely tuned photophysical properties. However, it is still challenging for them to simultaneously achieve high brightness and red-shifted absorption and emission. Herein, furan is adopted as the D unit to construct NIR-II fluorophores, demonstrating red-shift of absorption, enhanced absorption coefficient and fluorescent quantum yield when compared with the generally used thiophene counterparts. The high brightness and desirable pharmacokinetics of the optimized fluorophore, IR-FFCHP, endows improved performance for angiography and tumor-targeting imaging. Furthermore, dual-NIR-II imaging of tumor and sentinel lymph nodes (LNs) has been achieved with IR-FFCHP and PbS/CdS quantum dots, enabling the in vivo imaging navigated LNs surgery in tumor-bearing mise. This work demonstrates the potential of furan for constructing bright NIR-II fluorophores for biological imaging.

• 单位
  吉林大学