Tumor-associated antigen-specific cell imaging based on upconversion luminescence and nucleic acid rolling circle amplification.

Tumor-associated antigen (TAA)-based diagnosis has gained prominence for early tumor screening, treatment monitoring, prognostic assessment, and minimal residual disease detection. However, limitations such as low sensitivity and difficulty in extracting non-specific binding membrane proteins still exist in traditional detection methods. Upconversion luminescence (UCL) exhibits unique physical and chemical properties under wavelength near-infrared light excitation. Rolling circle amplification (RCA) is an efficient DNA amplification technique with amplification factors as high as 105 . Therefore, the above two excellent techniques can be employed for highly accurate imaging analysis of tumor cells. Herein, we developed a novel nanoplatform for TAA-specific cell imaging based on UCL and RCA technology. An aptamer-primer complex selectively binds to Mucin 1 (MUC1), one of TAA on cell surface, to trigger RCA reaction, generating a large number of repetitive sequences. These sequences provide lots of binding sites for complementary signal probes, producing UCL from lanthanide-doped upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) after releasing quencher group. The experimental results demonstrate the specific attachment of upconversion nanomaterials to cancer cells which express a high level of MUC1, indicating the potential of UCNPs and RCA in tumor imaging.