Functionalized Acrylonitriles with Aggregation-Induced Emission: Structure Tuning by Simple Reaction-Condition Variation, Efficient Red Emission, and Two-Photon Bioimaging

Acrylonitriles with aggregation-induced emission (AIE) characteristics have been found to show promising applications in two-photon biomedical imaging. Generally, elaborate synthetic efforts are required to achieve different acrylonitriles with distinct functionalities. In this work, we first reported the synthesis of two different group-functionalized AIE-active acrylonitriles (TPAT-AN-XF and 2TPAT-AN) obtained simply by mixing the same reactants at different temperatures using a facile and transition metal-free synthetic method. These two AIE luminogens (AIEgens) exhibit unique properties such as bright red emission in the solid state, large Stokes shift, and large two-photon absorption cross section. Water-soluble nanoparticles (NPs) of 2TPAT-AN were prepared by a nanoprecipitation method. In vitro imaging data show that 2TPAT-AN NPs can selectively stain lysosome in live cells. Besides one-photon imaging, remarkable two-photon imaging of live tumor tissues can be achieved with high resolution and deep tissue penetration. 2TPAT-AN NPs show high biocompatibility and are successfully utilized in in vivo long-term imaging of mouse tumors with a high signal-to-noise ratio. Thus, the present work is anticipated to shed light on the preparation of a library of AIE-active functionalized acrylonitriles with intriguing properties for biomedical applications.