Aggregation-induced emission luminogen-assisted stimulated emission depletion nanoscopy for super-resolution mitochondrial visualization in live cells

摘要

Aggregation-induced emission luminogens (AIEgens) are fluorescent agents that are ideal for bioimaging and have been widely used for organelle targeting,cellular mapping,and tracing.Owing to their promising characteristics,AIEgen-based nanoparticles have recently been used for the stimulated emission depletion (STED) super-resolution imaging of fixed cells.In the present study,and for the first time,we used an AIEgen for dynamic STED nanoscopic imaging of a specific organelle in live cancer cells.TPA-T-CyP is a synthetic red&NIR-emitting luminogen with AIE features that can spontaneously and specifically aggregate on mitochondria without the need for encapsulation or surface modification.The STED efficiency of aggregated TPA-T-CyP can reach more than 80％,and super-resolution imaging of TPA-T-CyP-stained mitochondria in live HeLa cells is possible,with a lateral spatial resolution of 74 nm.We found that TPA-T-CyP enabled the dynamic visualization of mitochondria,and the motion,fusion,and fission of mitochondria were clearly observable on a super-resolution scale.AIEgen-based super-resolution organelle visualization has great potential for many basic biomedical studies.