Design and Applications of NIR Lanthanide Molecular Probes for Bioimaging and Biosensing

Near-infrared (NIR, 700-1700 nm) imaging has emerged as an advanced technology for real-time monitoring of various physiological and pathological procedures and visualization of biological entities.NIR imaging recently gains increasing attention owing to the less background interference, deeper tissue penetration, higher signal-to-noise ratio and temporal/spatial resolution.Furthermore, how to design NIR luminescent molecular probes becomes critical in biological NIR imaging.Lanthanide molecular probes have a promising prospective for the merits such as small size, low toxicity, long decay lifetime, low photobleaching and f-f transition of characteristic element emission.In this minireview, we summarized the sensitization principle and design strategy of NIR Ln molecular probes and the relevant biomedical applications.