Light-Enhanced Bacterial Killing and Less Toxic Cell Imaging: Multicationic Aggregation-Induced Emission Matters

The newly emerged pathogenic bacteria leads to the bactericides generations one by one, which is definitely a long-term and costly process. For the small organic molecule used as antibacterial materials, photostability, biomembrane penetrating ability, and long-term antibacterial ability still are questionable. In this work, we synthesized the multiple-cation-charged aggregation-induced emission (AIE)-active polymer 1,2-diphenyl-1,2-bis(4-(pyridin-4-yl)phenyl) ethane–1,8-dibromooctane (DBPE-DBO). Due to the incorporating the dark toxicity from positively charged polymers, and the phototoxicity from generation of singlet oxygen, as well as AIE-active fluorescence performance, DBPE-DBO could be employed as an efficient bacteria targeting, imaging, and killing materials. Interestingly, DBPE-DBO was less toxic to the normal mammalian cells, which leads us to verify that DBPE-DBO could be used as a very cell-membrane permeable nucleus imaging probes. Thus, our research results may provide a new concept for the designing advanced biomaterials with versatile antibacterial properties and cell imaging ability.