Light and endogenous enzyme triggered plasmonic antennas for accurate subcellular molecular imaging with enhanced spatial resolution
Developing accurate tumor-specific molecular imaging approaches holds great potential for evaluating cancer progression. However, traditional molecular imaging approaches still suffered 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-fluorescence (PEF) technique, off-tumor signal leakage at subcellular level was effectively reduced, resulting in the significantly enhanced discrimination ratio of tumor/normal cells (~11.57-fold) which is better than previous reported works, demonstrating great prospects of this plasmonic antennas triggered by light and endogenous enzyme for tumor-specific molecular imaging at subcellular level.
