Abstract
Lysosomes are important acidic subcellular organelles whose dysfunction can lead to some related diseases. The development of new lysosome-imaging-guided AIEgens for the photodynamic therapy of cancer cells is important. In this work, two novel organic compounds with AIE characteristics, namely, TPAB-CF(3) and TPAB-diCF(3), were designed and synthesized by introducing the weakly basic morpholinyl moiety with lysosome-targeting ability into a triphenylamine-based luminogen. The distorted spatial feature of TPA and the D(1)-D(2)-π-A structure of these AIEgens prevented the aggregation-caused quenching of traditional fluorescent molecules and efficiently promoted the separation of the HOMO and LUMO. The outcomes were AIE features and a narrow single-triplet energy gap. Furthermore, TPAB-CF(3) and TPAB-diCF(3) showed bright yellow fluorescence emission peaks at 577 and 601 nm; large Stokes shifts of 234 and 256 nm, respectively; and excellent lysosome-targeted imaging of HeLa cells (Pearson's coefficient = 0.90). In addition to the good (1)O(2)-generation ability under light irradiation, these AIEgens achieved the high-efficiency bright lysosome imaging-guided photodynamic killing of cancer cells under white-light irradiation.