Membrane-Bound Molecular Rotors Measure Viscosity in Live Cells via Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging
By J. Levitt, M. Kuimova, G. Yahioglu, P. Chung, K. Suhling, D. Phillips. 2009
217 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We report intracellular fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) and fluorescence anisotropy measurements of two meso-substituted fluorophores based on the boron−dipyrrin (BODIPY) structure. Both dyes incorporate hydrophobic groups, which render them membrane-soluble. We have obtained values for quantum yields, radiative and nonradiative rate constants, fluorescence lifetimes, and time-resolved anisotropy data for the dyes in homogeneous methanol/glycerol solutions of varying viscosities from 0.6 to 950 cP. We find that the fluorescence lifetimes and rotational correlation times for both dyes increase with increasing viscosity, as predicted by theory. These molecules can thus serve as fluorescent molecular rotors to report on local microviscosity, including that in live cells. The dyes are readily taken up by cells as imaged using confocal fluorescence microscopy. Using FLIM, we have detected two distinct fluorescence lifetime populations for both dyes in live SK-OV-3 human ovarian carcinoma cells, correspond...
Subfields: Bioengineering, Materials Chemistry, Spectroscopy
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8eaa2db253dfe93145eb865807da5fc95b946fcb
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In Bioengineering
In Materials Chemistry
In Spectroscopy
Citations in the corpus
- Environment-sensitive behavior of fluorescent molecular rotors (2010, background): “Equation 1 has become so popular that in some instances the existence of this power-law relationship has been used to purport TICT behavior of specific molecules [56-59].”