Design and Construction of Highly Luminescent Transparent Woody Materials Exhibiting Unique Fluorescence-Enhanced Staining Effects for Visualization of Intrinsic Microporous Networks

Luminescent wood materials are an emerging class of biomass hybrid host materials owing to the hierarchical porous structure and functionalization versatility. The fluorescence properties are largely dependent on exogenous fluorophores, which are, however, often plagued by notorious aggregation effects. In this work, an efficient strategy for the preparation of luminescent transparent wood materials is developed by incorporating tetraphenylethylene-derived aggregation-induced emission (AIE)-active fluorophores during a delignification-backfill transparency process. These wood hybrids showed unexpected luminescence enhancement that significantly increased the fluorescence quantum yield of the fluorophores up to 99%, much higher than that of the fluorophores in other states such as crystalline solids or doped in a polymer substrate. Mechanistic investigations reveal that in situ polymerization of prepolymerized methyl methacrylate in delignified microporous wood frames produces high molecular weight ordered PMMA polymers, resulting in a rigid molecular environment that improves the luminescence efficiency of TPE-based fluorophores at the interfaces of PMMA polymer and cell walls. By confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM), this excellent fluorescence staining capability was furthermore utilized to visualize the intrinsic porous network of wood in three dimensions over a large volume with submicrometer resolution, thus providing an alternative approach to the study of structure–function relationships in such wood hybrids.