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Facilely Fabricated Luminescent Nanoparticle Thermosensor for Real-Time Microthermography in Living Animals
journal contribution
posted on 2016-09-27, 00:00 authored by Ferdinandus, Satoshi Arai, Shinji Takeoka, Shin’ichi Ishiwata, Madoka Suzuki, Hirotaka SatoThis
paper presents a high-sensitivity luminescent nanoparticle
thermosensor capable of real-time microthermography in a living organism.
Microthermography, or microscopically visualizing the temperature
distribution within living cells, tissues, and organisms, is a promising
technology to explore various physiological activities at the microscale.
Using a facile nanoprecipitation method, we fabricated a polymer–nanoparticle
embedding EuDT, a thermosensitive high-luminescence-emitter dye molecule,
and rhodamine 800, a luminescent molecule excitable with low energy
light and less sensitive to temperature. The nanoparticle thermosensor
was largely exempted from the background noise, which is the undesired
luminescence from the target biological sample, enabling direct acquisition
of luminescence intensities from the thermosensor within the specified
area of 68 μm × 68 μm on the muscle tissue of a living
insect, i.e., real-time microthermography, without the need of subtracting
background noise. Thus, we successfully mapped out the temperature
shift due to the animal’s voluntary heat production. The nanoparticle
thermosensor capable of in vivo temperature mapping must be a useful
biological thermographic technology to explore microscopic heat productions
in living organisms.