Millisecond-Range Time-Resolved Bioimaging Enabled through Ultralong Aqueous Phosphorescence Probes

Probes featuring room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) are promising tools for time-resolved imaging. It is worth noting that the time scale of timeresolved bioimaging generally ranges around the microsecond level, because of the short-lived emission. Herein, the first example of millisecond-range time-resolved bioimaging is illustrated, which is enabled through a kind of ultralong aqueous phosphorescence probes (i.e., cyclo-(Arg-Gly-AspD-Tyr-Cys)-conjugated zinc-doped silica nanospheres), with a RTP emission lasting for approximate to 5 s and a lifetime as long as 743.7 ms. We demonstrate that live cells and deep tumor tissue in mice can be specifically targeted through immune-phosphorescence imaging, with a high signal-to-background ratio (SBR) value of 69 for in vitro imaging, and approximate to 627 for in vivo imaging, respectively. We further show that, compared to that of fluorescence imaging, the SBR enhancement of millisecond-range time-resolved in vivo bioimaging is up to 105 times.

Automated summary

This article introduces a probe with ultralong phosphorescence lifetime for millisecond-range time-resolved bioimaging, which demonstrates high signal-to-background ratio in imaging live cells and deep tumor tissue in mice.