Strategies to design conjugated polymer based materials for biological sensing and imaging

In recent years, conjugated polymers (CPs) characterized with excellent optical properties and versatile chemical structures have become popular species for biological sensing and imaging. Many creative strategies have been proposed to furnish CPs with distinguished properties or integrate CPs with other functional moieties to form multifunctional materials, which have been widely applied in different biological conditions, ranging from in vitro to in vivo experiments. This review provides a brief introduction to recent strategies for constructing these CP-based materials for biological sensing and imaging applications, where the design strategies of the two basic components (backbones and side chains) of CPs are firstly highlighted, followed by the construction of CP-based composites including nanoparticle strategies and hybridization strategies. The challenges and opportunities in this field are also discussed in this review.