An article entitled “Cell-Penetrating Peptides Transport Non-Covalently Linked Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence Nanoparticles for Time-Resolved Luminescence Imaging” was recently published in the top journal “Journal of the American Chemical Society”.Prof. Xuewen Shu and Prof. Jintao Zhu from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), and Prof. Qiang Zhao fromNanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications are corresponding authors.Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics (HUST)is the first institution of the paper.
Luminescent probes and nanoparticles with long excited state lifetimes are essential for time-resolved biological imaging. However, many luminescent agent would be kept out by cytomembranes, usually accumulate passively in cells, leading to long incubating time. Although vector molecules such as cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs) with covalently linked fluorophores have been widely used for fluorescence imaging, preparation of peptide conjugates was usually complicated and tedious, and each modified CPP was only used for translocating the linked cargos.
In this research, a simple triblock copeptide, F6G6(rR)3R2, was designed for transporting noncovalently linked fluorescence nanoparticles. This peptide combined the advantage of high permeability of CPP and amphiphilicity for transporting non-novalently linked hydrophobic fluorophores crossing cellular barriers. Three different classical thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) molecules could self-assemble into well-dispersed nanoparticles with F6G6(rR)3R2in aqueous solution. These nanoparticles showed low cytotoxicity, and could penetrate membranes easily. Moreover, long-lived luminescence enabled them to be used in time-resolved luminescence imaging in oxygenic environments. These findings greatly expanded the applications of cell-penetrating peptides for delivery of molecules and nanoparticles by only non-covalent interactions, which were more flexible and easier than covalent modifications.
Figure 1. Schematic illustration showing the cell-penetrating nanoparticles assembled by the amphiphilic peptide (F6G6(rR)3R2) and TADF molecules.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51603152, 51525302 and 61775074) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (2017M620315 and 2018T110757).
Paper linking：https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.8b08438
