Ultrabright organic dots with aggregation-induced emission characteristics for cell tracking

Noninvasive fluorescence cell tracking provides critical information on the physiological displacement and translocation of actively migrating cells, which deepens our understanding of biomedical engineering, oncological research, stem cell transplantation and therapies. Non-viral fluorescent protein transfection based cell tracing has been widely used but with issues related to cell type-dependent expression, lagged readout, immunogenicity and mutagenesis. Alternative cell tracking methods are therefore desired to attain reliable, stable, and efficient labeling over a long time. In this work, we have successfully developed ultra-bright organic dots with aggregation-induced emission (AIE dots) and demonstrated their capabilities for cellular imaging and cell tracking. The AIE dots possess high fluorescence, super photostability, and excellent cellular retention and biocompatibility. As compared to commonly used pMAX-GFP plasmid labeling approach, the organic AIE dots showed excellent cell labeling on all tested human cell lines and superior tracing performance, which opens up new opportunities in the cell-based immunotherapies and other related biological researches.