A route to brightly fluorescent carbon nanotubes for near-infrared imaging in mice

By Kevin D. Welsher, Zhuang Liu, S. Sherlock, J. Robinson, Zhuo Chen, D. Daranciang, Hongjie Dai. Nature Nanotechnology, 2009

1,158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The near-infrared photoluminescence intrinsic to semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes is ideal for biological imaging owing to the low autofluorescence and deep tissue penetration in the near-infrared region beyond 1 µm. However, biocompatible single-walled carbon nanotubes with high quantum yield have been elusive. Here, we show that sonicating single-walled carbon nanotubes with sodium cholate, followed by surfactant exchange to form phospholipid–polyethylene glycol coated nanotubes, produces in vivo imaging agents that are both bright and biocompatible. The exchange procedure is better than directly sonicating the tubes with the phospholipid–polyethylene glycol, because it results in less damage to the nanotubes and improves the quantum yield. We show whole-animal in vivo imaging using an InGaAs camera in the 1–1.7 µm spectral range by detecting the intrinsic near-infrared photoluminescence of the ‘exchange’ single-walled carbon nanotubes at a low dose (17 mg l−1 injected dose). The deep tissue penetration and low autofluorescence background allowed high-resolution intravital microscopy imaging of tumour vessels beneath thick skin.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6781e31196bef38b6ea6a6a848cb173261259276

How researchers see this paper

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In Biomedical Engineering

1. Guosong Hong
2. Bai Yang
3. Qiangbin Wang
4. Yejun Zhang
5. Guangcun Chen
6. Shoujun Zhu
7. Hongjie Dai
8. Zhuang Liu

In Materials Chemistry

1. Bai Yang
2. Shoujun Zhu
3. Yubin Song
4. Guosong Hong
5. Junhu Zhang
6. Hongjie Dai
7. Xiaohuan Zhao
8. Qiangbin Wang

Citations in the corpus

• The photoluminescence mechanism in carbon dots (graphene quantum dots, carbon nanodots, and polymer dots): current state and future perspective (2015, background): “Up to now, many kinds of fluorescent carbon-based nanomaterials have been synthesized, including carbon nanodots (CNDs) [1, 2], fluorescent carbon nanotubes (CNTs) [3], graphene oxide (GO) [4, 5], graphene quantum dots (GQDs) [6–12], polymer dots (PDs) [13–15], nanodiamonds [16, 17], and so on.”