TY - JOUR
T1 - Water-Soluble Blue Fluorescent Nonconjugated Polymer Dots from Hyaluronic Acid and Hydrophobic Amino Acids
AU - Bhattacharya, Deep S.
AU - Bapat, Aishwarya
AU - Svechkarev, Denis
AU - Mohs, Aaron M.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and bioengineering (R01 EB019449) and the National Cancer Institute (R21 CA212500 and P30 CA036727). We would like to thank James Talaska and Janice Taylor at the UNMC Advanced Microscopy Core Facility, which receives partial support from the National Institute for General Medical Science (NIGMS) INBRE (P20 GM103427) and COBRE (P30 GM106397) grants, as well as support from the National Cancer Institute (P30 CA036727) and the Nebraska Research Initiative. We would also like to thank Victoria Smith and Samantha Wall at the UNMC Flow Cytometry Research Facility, which is administrated through the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and supported by state funds from the Nebraska Research Initiative (NRI) and The Fred and Pamela Buffett Cancer Center’s National Cancer Institute Cancer Support Grant. Major instrumentation has been provided by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, The University of Nebraska Foundation, the Nebraska Banker’s Fund, and by the NIH-NCRR Shared Instrument Program. Funding from UNMC supported a Program of Excellence fellowship awarded to D.S.B. and the Bukey Memorial Fund Fellowship to A.B.. The authors thank Dr. Amarnath Natarajan for providing FTIR facility to this work. We gratefully acknowledge the TEM services provided by Tom Bargar at the Electron Microscopy Facility. The authors would also like to thank Shah Valloppilly for XRD at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and XPS by Randy Nessler and Kenny Horkley at the Central Microscopy Research Facility of the University of Iowa. We would also like to thank Madeline Olson for her technical assistance in designing manuscript figures and critical review of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society.
PY - 2021/7/20
Y1 - 2021/7/20
N2 - Fluorescent polymers have been increasingly investigated to improve their water solubility and biocompatibility to enhance their performance in drug delivery and theranostic applications. However, the environmentally friendly synthesis and dual functionality of such systems remain a challenge due to the complicated synthesis of conventional fluorescent materials. Herein, we generated a novel blue fluorescent polymer dot through chemical conjugation of hydrophobic amino acids to hyaluronic acid (HA) under one-pot green chemistry conditions. These nonconjugated fluorescent polymer dots (NCPDs) are water soluble, nontoxic to cells, have high fluorescence quantum yield, and can be used for in vitro bioimaging. HA-derived NCPDs exhibit excitation wavelength-dependent fluorescent properties. In addition, the NCPDs also show enhanced doxorubicin loading and delivery in naive and drug-resistant breast cancer cells in 2D and 3D tumor cellular systems. These results demonstrate the potential for successful synthetic scale-up and applications for HA-derived NCPDs.
AB - Fluorescent polymers have been increasingly investigated to improve their water solubility and biocompatibility to enhance their performance in drug delivery and theranostic applications. However, the environmentally friendly synthesis and dual functionality of such systems remain a challenge due to the complicated synthesis of conventional fluorescent materials. Herein, we generated a novel blue fluorescent polymer dot through chemical conjugation of hydrophobic amino acids to hyaluronic acid (HA) under one-pot green chemistry conditions. These nonconjugated fluorescent polymer dots (NCPDs) are water soluble, nontoxic to cells, have high fluorescence quantum yield, and can be used for in vitro bioimaging. HA-derived NCPDs exhibit excitation wavelength-dependent fluorescent properties. In addition, the NCPDs also show enhanced doxorubicin loading and delivery in naive and drug-resistant breast cancer cells in 2D and 3D tumor cellular systems. These results demonstrate the potential for successful synthetic scale-up and applications for HA-derived NCPDs.
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U2 - 10.1021/acsomega.1c01343
DO - 10.1021/acsomega.1c01343
M3 - Article
C2 - 34308024
AN - SCOPUS:85111199160
SN - 2470-1343
VL - 6
SP - 17890
EP - 17901
JO - ACS Omega
JF - ACS Omega
IS - 28
ER -