Riboflavin: A natural aggregation-induced emission luminogen (AIEgen) with excited-state proton transfer process for bioimaging

摘要

In recent years, aggregation-induced emission luminogens (AIEgens) have many applications in bioimaging due to they have high fluorescence quantum yield, perfect biocompatibility, good resistance to photobleaching. However, the practical application of the AIEgens was greatly limited due to their disadvantages of complex synthesis, high cost, environmentally unfriendly and difficult to degrade. Here, the riboflavin (Rf, namely vitamin B2) was found to be a natural active AIEgen with excited-state proton transfer (ESPT), which is widely existed in the foods from both plants and animals. The AIE characteristics of Rf were investigated by using UV-Vis and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy. Furthermore, Rf as an AIEgen with ESPT has perfect biocompatibility and has little cytotoxicity, which was successfully used for bioimaging in cellular cytoplasm. These results all indicated that Rf was a potential natural material as promising AIE probes. This work aim to study the AIE-active luminogen of Rf with ESPT process for bio-probe and bioimaging applications.