title: Chirality enriched (12,1) and (11,3) single-walled carbon nanotubes for biological imaging.
abstract: The intrinsic band gap photoluminescence of semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) makes them promising biological imaging probes in the second near-infrared (NIR-II, 1.0-1.4 μm) window. Thus far, SWNTs used for biological applications have been a complex mixture of metallic and semiconducting species with random chiralities, preventing simultaneous resonant excitation of all semiconducting nanotubes and emission at a single well-defined wavelength. Here, we developed a simple gel filtration method to enrich semiconducting (12,1) and (11,3) SWNTs with identical resonance absorption at ~808 nm and emission near ~1200 nm. The chirality sorted SWNTs showed ~5-fold higher photoluminescence intensity under resonant excitation of 808 nm than unsorted SWNTs on a per-mass basis. Real-time in vivo video imaging of whole mouse body and tumor vessels was achieved using a ~6-fold lower injected dose of (12,1) and (11,3) SWNTs (~3 μg per mouse or ~0.16 mg/kg of body weight vs 1.0 mg/kg for unsorted SWNTs) than a previous heterogeneous mixture, demonstrating the first resonantly excited and chirality separated SWNTs for biological imaging.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
authors.forename: Shuo
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Diao
authors.forename: Guosong
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Hong
authors.forename: Joshua T
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Robinson
authors.forename: Liying
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Jiao
authors.forename: Alexander L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Antaris
authors.forename: Justin Z
authors.initials: JZ
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Charina L
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Choi
authors.forename: Hongjie
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Dai
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D049449:Luminescence; D051379:Mice; D008819:Mice, Nude; D037742:Nanotubes, Carbon / Q000737:chemistry*; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000098:blood supply* / Q000473:pathology; D061848:Optical Imaging / Q000295:instrumentation*; D012666:Semiconductors; D014018:Tissue Distribution
chemical_list: D037742:Nanotubes, Carbon