We designed a strategy to monitor self-assembling supramolecular nanocarriers and their cargo simultaneously in the intracellular space with fluorescence measurements. It is based on Fӧrster resonance energy transfer (FRET) between complementary chromophores covalently integrated in the macromolecular backbone of amphiphilic polymers and/or noncovalently encapsulated in supramolecular assemblies of the amphiphilic components. Indeed, these polymers assemble into a micelles in aqueous phase to bring energy donors and acceptors in close proximity and allow energy transfer. The resulting supramolecular assemblies maintain their integrity after travelling into the intracellular space and do not lose their molecular guests in the process. Furthermore, this mechanism can also be exploited to probe the fate of complementary nanoparticles introduced within cells in consecutive incubation steps. Efficient energy transfer occurs in the intracellular space after the sequential incubation of nanocarriers incorporating donors first and then nanoparticles containing acceptors or vice versa. The two sets of nanostructured assemblies ultimately co-localize in the cell interior to bring donors and acceptors together and enable energy transfer. Thus, this protocol is particularly valuable to monitor the transport properties of supramolecular nanocarriers inside living cells and can eventually contribute to the fundamental understating of the ability of these promising vehicles to deliver contrast agents and/or drugs intracellularly in view of possible diagnostics and/or therapeutic applications.
The identification of noninvasive strategies to monitor dynamics within living organisms in real time is essential to elucidate the fundamental factors governing a diversity of biological processes. This study demonstrates that the supramolecular delivery of photoactivatable fluorophores in Drosophila melanogaster embryos allows the real-time tracking of translocating molecules. The designed photoactivatable fluorophores switch from an emissive reactant to an emissive product with spectrally-resolved fluorescence, under moderate blue-light irradiation conditions. These hydrophobic fluorescent probes can be encapsulated within supramolecular hosts and delivered to the cellular blastoderm of the embryos. Thus, the combination of supramolecular delivery and fluorescence photoactivation translates into a noninvasive method to monitor dynamics in vivo and can evolve into a general chemical tool to track motion in biological specimens.
Conventional fluorophore–ligand constructs for the detection of cancer cells generally produce relatively weak signals with modest contrast. The inherently low brightness accessible per biding event with the pairing of a single organic fluorophore to a single ligand as well as the contribution of unbound probes to background fluorescence are mainly responsible for these limitations. Our laboratories identified a viable structural design to improve both brightness and contrast. It is based on the integration of activatable fluorophores and targeting ligands within the same macromolecular construct. The chromophoric components are engineered to emit bright fluorescence exclusively in acidic environments. The targeting agents are designed to bind complementary receptors overexpressed on the surface of cancer cells and allow internalization of the macromolecules into acidic organelles. As a result of these properties, our macromolecular probes switch their intense emission on exclusively in the intracellular space of target cells with minimal background fluorescence from the extracellular matrix. In fact, these operating principles translate into a 170-fold enhancement in brightness, relative to equivalent but isolated chromophoric components, and a 3-fold increase in contrast, relative to model but non-activatable fluorophores. Thus, our macromolecular probes might ultimately evolve into valuable analytical tools to highlight cancer cells with optimal signal-to-noise ratios in a diversity of biomedical applications.
The covalent integration of fluorescent and photoswitchable components within the same molecular skeleton can be exploited to activate fluorescence under optical control. Specifically, a photoswitchable oxazine heterocycle can be connected to either a coumarin or a borondipyrromethene fluorophore. Illumination of the resulting molecular dyads at an appropriate activation wavelength either opens the heterocycle reversibly or cleaves it irreversibly, depending on the relative positions of its methylene and nitro substituents. These photochemical transformations shift bathochromically the main absorption band of the fluorophore and allow its selective excitation at a given wavelength. These hydrophobic molecular dyads can be entrapped within the hydrophobic interior of self-assembling nanoparticles of amphiphilic polymer. The supramolecular envelope around the switchable compounds enables their transfer into aqueous environments and their operation under these conditions with minimal influence on their photochemical and photophysical properties. The reversible fluorescence activation, possible in one instance, imposes intermittence on the detected emission and offers the opportunity to resolve closely-spaced nanocarriers in time to reconstruct images with subdiffraction resolution. The irreversible fluorescence activation, possible in the other, maintains emission on after the activation event and permits the monitoring of the diffusion of the activated nanocarriers in real time with the sequential acquisition of images. Thus, these operating principles to solubilize and operate photoswitchable fluorophores in aqueous environments with the aid of supramolecular nanocarriers can lead to valuable protocols to image specimens with subdiffraction resolution and to monitor dynamic events noninvasively.
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