Use of fluorescent NIR dyes in silica nanoparticles and as enzyme substrates in bioanalytical applications

Abstract

Near-Infrared (NIR) absorbing carbocyanine dyes have been increasingly used in analytical, biological and medical fields as they can be useful for developing bioanalytical and biomedical methods. The utilization of the NIR spectral region (650-900 nm) is advantageous and is due to the inherently lower background interference and the high molar absorptivities of NIR chromophores. NIR dyes typically have relatively lower fluorescent quantum yield as compared to visible fluorophores, but much higher molar absorptivities which more than compensates for the lower quantum yields regarding detection limits. Fluorescence intensity of NIR dyes significantly increases by enclosing several dye molecules in silica nanoparticles. Self quenching may become a problem for carbocyanines at such high concentrations that may be present in the silica nanoparticles. Dyes that have large Stokes’ shift can significantly decrease this problem. Increased Stokes’ shift for carbocyanines dyes can be achieved by substituting meso position halogens with a linker containing aliphatic or aromatic amino moiety which also serves as a covalent linker for attaching the dye molecule to the nanoparticle backbone. The primary applications of these particles are for bright fluorescent labels to be used in bioanalytical applications such as immunochemistry, flow cytometry, etc. This work also discusses the use of NIR dyes as enzyme substrates. NIR dyes can be used as enzyme substrates and hence for characterization of enzyme activity. The well characterized alkenesulfonate monooxygenase enzyme was chosen for these studies. Carbocyanines containing alkylsulfonate moieties do not exhibit significant fluorescence change upon binding to biomolecules however otherwise identical NIR dye analogs that contain alkylaldehyde moiety at the same position do exhibit changes which can be utilized for characterization of alkenesulfonate monooxygenase enzyme activity using near infrared dyes as substrates. In this study a new class of sulfonated penta- and heptamethine dyes were used as substrates in vitro utilizing a photo-reduced riboflavin mononucleotide (FMN) with a glucose/ glucose-oxygenase oxygen scavenging system. Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) detected CZE was utilized to detect the sulfonated and de-sulfonated carbocyanines. The lower fluorescence quantum yield of the less water soluble alkylaldehyde analogs was detected and enzyme activity was characterized.