Liposomes are of great interest and importance in tumor imaging, since they can greatly improve the imaging sensitivity and specificity by increasing the accumulation of contrast agents. Still, most liposome-based probes have high background signals during blood circulation, which limits enhancement of S/B ratio and tumor imaging sensitivity. To enhance the S/B ratio of tumor imaging, we construct a fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) and aggregation induced emission (AIE) based liposomal fluorescence probe TPE/BHQ-lipo with excellent FRET effect (99 %) and great fluorescence enhancement upon liposome rupture (120-fold) as well as efficient fluorescence recovery in tumor cell imaging. Finally, we used the TPE/BHQ-lipo to image 4T1 tumor upon intravenous injection of liposomes and the group showed enhanced signal to background ratio of 4.1, compared to 1.8 from control AIE-based liposomal group (TPE-lipo). Our work offers an excellent FRET and AIE-based liposomal probe for high-sensitive tumor imaging.
Keywords: Aggregation induced emission; Fluorescence imaging; Fluorescence resonance energy transfer; Liposome; Tumor imaging.
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