Ju Mei,†,‡,∥ Nelson L. C. Leung,†,‡,∥ Ryan T. K. Kwok,†,‡ Jacky W. Y. Lam,†,‡ and Ben Zhong Tang*,†,‡,§ †HKUST-Shenzhen Research Institute, Hi-Tech Park, Nanshan, Shenzhen 518057, China ‡Department of Chemistry, HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study, Institute of Molecular Functional Materials, Division of Biomedical Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Molecular Neuroscience, Division of Life Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China Guangdong Innovative Research Team, SCUT-HKUST Joint Research Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Luminescent Materials and Devices, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China

Aggregation-Induced Emission: Together We Shine, United We Soar!

"United we stand, divided we fall."--Aesop. Aggregation-induced emission (AIE) refers to a photophysical phenomenon shown by a group of luminogenic materials that are non-emissive when they are dissolved in good solvents as molecules but become highly luminescent when they are clustered in poor solvents or solid state as aggregates. In this Review we summarize the recent progresses made in the area of AIE research. We conduct mechanistic analyses of the AIE processes, unify the restriction of intramolecular motions (RIM) as the main cause for the AIE effects, and derive RIM-based molecular engineering strategies for the design of new AIE luminogens (AIEgens). Typical examples of the newly developed AIEgens and their high-tech applications as optoelectronic materials, chemical sensors and biomedical probes are presented and discussed.

Aggregation-Induced Emission: The Whole Is More Brilliant than the Parts

http://academic.oup.com/milmed/article-pdf/146/7/506/24126715/milmed-146-7-506.pdf

Goodman and Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics

Inkjet printing is familiar as a method of printing text and images onto porous surfaces. In the last few years it has been used as a free-form fabrication method for building three-dimensional parts and is being explored as a way of printing electrical and optical devices, especially where these involve organic components. Inkjet printers are also being used to produce arrays of proteins and nucleic acids. The need for a versatile inkjet technology for free-forming materials and for multilayer devices raises a number of materials problems that do not apply to conventional printing of images. Higher resolutions will be needed if organic transistors are to be printed. Also, it must be possible to print pinhole-free layers to avoid shorting of devices. Multiple layers must be printed such that they mix and react to form a single material or such that they form discrete unmixed layers. Printing on dense rather than porous substrates will be the norm. This article reviews the range of materials that has been ...

Inkjet Printing for Materials and Devices

Electrogenerated chemiluminescence (also called electrochemiluminescence and abbreviated ECL) is the process whereby species generated at electrodes undergo high-energy electron-transfer reactions to form excited states that emit light. The first detailed ECL studies were described by Hercules and Bard et al. in the mid-1960s, although reports concerning light emission during electrolysis date back to the 1920s by Harvey. After about 40 years study, ECL has now become a very powerful analytical technique and been widely used in the areas of, for example, immunoassay, food and water testing, and biowarfare agent detection. ECL has also been successfully exploited as a detector of flow injection analysis (FIA), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), capillary electrophoresis, and micro total analysis (μTAS). Figure 1 illustrates a time line of various events in the development of ECL. A literature survey using SciFinder Scholar reveals that more than 2000 journal articles, book chapters, and patents on various topics of ECL have been published. The overall number of publications, as shown in Figure 2, has increased exponentially over the past 20 years, of which 40–50% were biorelated. Similar amounts of ECL papers could be also found from the Thomson ISI Web of Science as well as † Telephone (601) 266 4716; fax (601) 266 6075; e-mail wujian.miao@ usm.edu. Wujian Miao received his undergraduate diploma in chemistry from Nantong University (Nantong, China) in 1982, his M.Sc. degree in analytical chemistry from Zhongshan University (Guangzhou, China, with Jinyuan Mo) in 1991, and his Ph.D. degree in electrochemistry from Monash University (Melbourne, Australia, with Alan M. Bond) in 2000. He then served as a Research Scientist in CSIRO (Melbourne, Australia), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin with Allen J. Bard in 2001. Since 2004 he has served as an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Electrogenerated Chemiluminescence and Its Biorelated Applications

Biotechnological applications of bioluminescence and chemiluminescence

Many recent bioanalytical systems based on immunologic and hybridization reactions in a mono- or bidimensional microarray format require technology that can produce arrays of spots containing biospecific molecules. Some microarray deposition instruments are commercially available, and other devices have been described in recent papers. We describe a system obtained by adapting a commercial ink-jet printer and used to produce mono- and bidimensional arrays of spots containing horseradish peroxidase on cellulose paper. In a few minutes, it was possible to obtain bidimensional arrays containing several thousands of spots with a diameter as low as 0.2 mm, with each of which requiring only a few nanoliters of the enzyme deposition solution. The quantity of enzyme in each spot was evaluated with a chemiluminescent reaction and a charge-coupled device-based, low-light imaging luminograph. The chemiluminescence measurements revealed that the reproducibility of the enzyme deposition was satisfactory for analytical purposes, with the variation coefficients being lower than 10% in almost all cases.

https://www.future-science.com/doi/pdf/10.2144/00283st07

Protein microdeposition using a conventional ink-jet printer.

Analytical chemiluminescence and bioluminescence represent a versatile, ultrasensitive tool with a wide range of applications in diverse fields such as biotechnology, pharmacology, molecular biology, clinical and environmental chemistry. Enzyme activities and enzyme substrates and inhibitors can be efficiently determined when directly involved in luminescent reactions, and also when they take part in a reaction suitable for coupling to a final light-emitting reaction. Chemiluminescence detection has been exploited in the fields of flow-injection analysis and column-liquid chromatographic and capillary-electrophoretic separative systems, due to its high sensitivity when compared with colorimetric detection. It has widely been used as an indicator of reactive oxygen species formation in cells and whole organs, thus allowing the study of a number of pathophysiological conditions related to oxidative stress. Chemiluminescence represents a sensitive and rapid alternative to radioactivity as a detection principle in immunoassays for the determination of a wide range of molecules (hormones, food additives, environmental pollutants) and in filter membrane biospecific reactions (Southern, Northern, Western, dot blot) for the determination of nucleic acids and proteins. Chemiluminescence has also been used for the sensitive and specific localization and quantitation of target analytes in tissue sections and single cells by immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization techniques. A relatively recent application regards the use of luminescent reporter genes for the development of bioassays based on genetically engineered microorganisms or mammalian cells able to emit visible light in response to specific inorganic and organic compounds. Finally, the high detectability and rapidity of bio- and chemiluminescent detection make it suitable for the development of microarray-based high throughput screening assays, in which simultaneous, multianalyte detection is performed on multiple samples.

Bio- and chemiluminescence in bioanalysis

The possibility of detecting a few molecules using bioluminescence and chemiluminescence is exciting, especially in the context of miniaturized analytical devices.

Peer Reviewed: Analytical Bioluminescence and Chemiluminescence

Bacteria communicate among themselves using certain chemical signaling molecules. These signaling molecules generally are N-acyl homoserine lactones (AHLs) in Gram-negative bacteria and oligopeptides in Gram-positive bacteria. In addition, both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria produce a family of signaling molecules known as autoinducer-2 that they employ for their communications. Bacteria coordinate their behavior by releasing and responding to the chemical signaling molecules present in proportion to their population density. This phenomenon is known as quorum sensing. The role of bacteria in the pathogenesis of several diseases, including gastrointestinal (GI) disorders, is well established. Moreover, rather recently bacterial quorum sensing has been implicated in the onset of bacterial pathogenicity. Thus, we hypothesized that the signaling molecules involved in bacterial communication may serve as potential biomarkers for the diagnosis and management of several bacteria-related diseases. For that, we previously developed a method based on genetically engineered whole-cell sensing systems for the rapid, sensitive, cost-effective and quantitative detection of AHLs in biological samples, such as saliva and stool, from both healthy and diseased individuals with GI disorders. Although various analytical methods, based on physical-chemical techniques and bacterial whole-cell biosensors, have been developed for the detection of AHLs in the supernatants of bacterial cultures, only a few of them have been applied to AHL monitoring in real samples. In this paper, we report work performed in our laboratory and review that from others that describes the detection of AHLs in biological, clinical samples, and report some of our recent experimental results.

Patrizia Pasini

Papers

Biotechnological applications of bioluminescence and chemiluminescence

Protein microdeposition using a conventional ink-jet printer.

Bio- and chemiluminescence in bioanalysis

Peer Reviewed: Analytical Bioluminescence and Chemiluminescence

Detection of bacterial quorum sensing N-acyl homoserine lactones in clinical samples