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Tetraphenylethylene-Induced Cross-Linked Vesicles with Tunable Luminescence and Controllable Stability
journal contribution
posted on 2017-08-04, 00:00 authored by Jingsheng Huang, Yunlong Yu, Liang Wang, Xingjian Wang, Zhongwei Gu, Shiyong ZhangLuminescence-tunable
vesicles (LTVs) are becoming increasingly attractive for their potential
application in optics, electronics, and biomedical technology. However,
for real applications, luminous efficiency and durability are two
urgent constraints to be overcome. Combining the advantages of aggregation-induced
emission in luminous enhancement and cross-linking in stability, we
herein fabricated tetraphenylethylene-induced cross-linked vesicles
with an entrapped acceptor of RhB (TPE-CVs@RhB), which achieved a
high-efficiency multicolor emission of the visible spectrum, including
white, by altering the amount of entrapped acceptor. Stability tests
show that the luminescence of TPE-CVs@RhB has excellent environmental
tolerance toward heating, dilution, doping of organic solvent, and
storage in serum. Further outstanding performance in the application
of fluorescent inks suggests that the new LTVs hold high potential
in industrialization. More attractively, although the TPE-CVs@RhB
can tolerate various harsh conditions, their stability can actually
be controlled through the cross-linker adopted. For example, the employment
of dithiothreitol in the present work produces an acid-labile β-thiopropionate
linker. The cellular uptake by HepG2 cells shows that the acid-labile
TPE-CVs@RhB can effectively respond to the acidic environment of cancer
cells and release the entrapped RhB molecules, indicative of promising
applications of this new type of LTVs in bioimaging and drug delivery.