Light and endogenous enzyme triggered plasmonic antennas for accurate subcellular molecular imaging with enhanced spatial resolution
Shuwei Chen, Yue Yin, Xiaozhe Pang, Congkai Wang, Lei Wang, Junqi Wang, Jiangfei Jia, Xinxue Liu, Shenghao Xu, Xiliang Luo
Abstract
Developing accurate tumor-specific molecular imaging approaches holds great potential for evaluating cancer progression. However, traditional molecular imaging approaches still suffer from restricted tumor specificity due to the "off-tumor" signal leakage. In this work, we proposed light and endogenous APE1-triggered plasmonic antennas for accurate tumor-specific subcellular molecular imaging with enhanced spatial resolution. Light activation ensures subcellular molecular imaging and endogenous enzyme activation ensures tumor-specific molecular imaging. In addition, combined with the introduction of plasmon enhanced fluorescence (PEF), off-tumor signal leakage at the subcellular level was effectively reduced, resulting in the significantly enhanced discrimination ratio of tumor/normal cells (∼11.57-fold) which is better than in previous reports, demonstrating great prospects of these plasmonic antennas triggered by light and endogenous enzymes for tumor-specific molecular imaging at the subcellular level.