posted on 2022-01-12, 16:35authored byRuixue Wei, Kun Liu, Ke Zhang, Yifan Fan, Hongyu Lin, Jinhao Gao
Manganese
oxide nanoparticles (NPs) have attracted increasing attention
recently as contrast agents (CAs) for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
However, the clinical translation and popularization of conventional
MnO NPs are hampered by their relatively poor imaging performance.
Herein, we report the construction of ultrasmall MnO NPs (USMnO) via a one-pot synthetic approach that show a much better
capability of T1-weighted contrast enhancement
for MRI (r1 = 15.6 ± 0.4 mM–1 s–1 at 0.5 T) than MnCl2 and conventional
large-sized MnO NPs (MnO-22). These USMnO are further coated with
zwitterionic dopamine sulfonate (ZDS) molecules, which improves their
biocompatibility and prevents nonspecific binding of serum albumins.
Interestingly, USMnO@ZDS are capable of passing through the blood–brain
barrier (BBB), which enables the acquisition of clear images showing
brain anatomic structures with T1-weighted
contrast-enhanced MRI. Therefore, our USMnO@ZDS could be used as a
promising MRI CA for the flexible and accurate diagnosis of brain
diseases, which is also instructive for the construction of manganese-based
CA with a high MRI performance.