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BIOIMAGING

Time to multiplex

Nature Nanotechnology volume 13, pages 879–880 (2018)Cite this article

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Quantitative near-infrared bioimaging gets a boost from time-domain multiplexing.

Optical imaging has a special status in bioimaging thanks to the potential high resolution it can achieve, important for image-guided surgery for instance, and to the relatively simple instrumentation it necessitates. Major problems for in vivo optical imaging, however, are the autofluorescence of tissues, resulting in low contrast; the short penetration of visible light; and difficulties in implementing multiplexing technologies. In principle, long-lived lanthanide bioprobes coupled with time-resolved detection1 or luminescence resonant energy transfer2 could overcome the first drawback. The second limitation can be partly offset by using probes that can be excited and emit respectively in the second and third near-infrared biological windows (NIR-II, 1,000–1,350 nm and NIR-III, 1,500–1,800 nm)3, as in the case of lanthanide nanoparticles (called NIR–NIR bioprobes). Finally, multiplexing is intimately linked to high-throughput technologies used in genomics, proteomics or personal medicine and relies on multicolour flow cytometry. However, application of this technique to optical imaging is hampered by the narrow spectral domain available and by instrumental burdens, such as the need for one detector per channel, which usually restrict its use to in vitro experiments. This situation prompted the idea of using lifetime measurements instead of spectral measurements to perform multiplex analyses and imaging and led to the development of ‘tunable τ-dots’4. However, in vivo NIR–NIR imaging is currently still limited to single or dual probes, and quantitative accuracy is not yet satisfying.

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Fig. 1: Achievements in time-domain multiplexing with multilayered downshifting nanoparticles NaGdF4@NaGdF4:Yb,Ln@NaYF4:Yb@NaNdF4:Yb (Ln = Ho, Er).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Chemical Sciences & Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

    Jean-Claude G. Bünzli

  2. Department of Chemistry, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, SAR, People’s Republic of China

    Jean-Claude G. Bünzli

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  1. Jean-Claude G. Bünzli
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Correspondence to Jean-Claude G. Bünzli.

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Bünzli, JC.G. Time to multiplex. Nature Nanotech 13, 879–880 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-018-0249-1

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