Near-Infrared and Visible Dual-Emitting Peptide by Modular Assembly of Nitrobenzoxadiazole and Neodymium Complexes

The synthetic difficulty of target-specific lanthanide complexes, despite their unique characteristics, limits their use in in vitro/ in vivo studies and biomedical applications. With commercially available and affordable reagents, a facile synthetic approach is developed to modularly deploy nitrobenzoxadiazole and neodymium complexes onto bioactive peptides. The yielded probes show observable neodymium emission with specific localization to corresponding biotargets in vitro, which became the first example of a stable, water-soluble, and target-specific neodymium(III) complex applicable for in vitro imaging with detectable brightness. An efficient and practical modular synthetic approach is reported to deploy all necessary components of luminescent lanthanide complexes onto target-specific peptides using only affordable and commercially available reagents. The yielded products with near-Infrared and visible dual-emitting features become the first example of neodymium complexes in cellular imaging. image