Recent Advances of Persistent Luminescence Nanoparticles in Bioapplications

Persistent luminescence phosphors are a novel group of promising luminescent materials with afterglow properties after the stoppage of excitation.In the past decade,persistent luminescence nanoparticles(PLNPs)with intriguing optical properties have attracted a wide range of attention in various areas.Especially in recent years,the development and applications in biomedical fields have been widely explored.Owing to the efficient elimination of the autofluorescence interferences from biotissues and the ultra-long near-infrared afterglow emission,many researches have focused on the manipulation of PLNPs in biosensing,cell tracking,bioimaging and cancer therapy.These achievements stimulated the growing interest in designing new types of PLNPs with desired superior characteristics and multiple functions.In this review,we summarize the works on synthesis methods,bioapplications,biomembrane modification and biosafety of PLNPs and highlight the recent advances in biosensing,imaging and imaging-guided therapy.We further discuss the new types of PLNPs as a newly emerged class of functional biomaterials for multiple applications.Finally,the remaining problems and challenges are discussed with suggestions and prospects for potential future directions in the biomedical applications.

Blood-based Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis using fluorescent peptide nanoparticle arrays

There is a critical need to diagnose and monitor the progression of Alzheimer’s disease(AD) using bloodbased biomarkers. At present, it is believed that tau biomarkers can be utilized to reliably detect AD.Multimodal techniques are highly sought after for AD diagnosis and progression monitoring. For this purpose, we developed a fluorescent peptide nanoparticles(f-PNPs) arrays that is capable of detecting multiple signals simultaneously. The concentration, aggregation stages, and Young’s modulus of tau biomarkers could be analyzed by monitoring the changes of multimodal fluorescence intensity, nano-morphological,and nano-mechanical properties of the f-PNPs arrays. Experimental results indicated that, compared to healthy human, the concentration, Young’s modulus, and aggregation levels of tau proteins in blood samples of clinically diagnosed AD patients increased continuously with the increase of disease severity. The minimally invasive and multimodal characterization techniques showed high signal-to-noise ratio for AD diagnosis.