Piorkowska, Wiktoria; (2025) Synthesis of Luciferin Gold Nanorod Conjugates for Bi-Modal Imaging. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text CORRECTED - Wiktoria-Piorkowska-thesis.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 May 2026. Download (26MB)

Abstract

Bioluminescence is the production and subsequent emission of visible light by a living organism as a result of a chemical reaction. Firefly luciferin, Dluciferin, is the light emitting substance found in certain insects. Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) is a non-invasive imaging technique that provides good contrast and spatial resolution while also benefitting from a high penetrability and sensitivity. PAI uses contrast agents like nanoparticles to enhance the photoacoustic signal. A problem with the use of exogenous contrast agents in PAI is verifying that they have entered the cells under study. This thesis concerns the investigation into linking D-luciferin and its analogues to a gold nanorod via a self-immolative linker, designed to degrade only within the intracellular environment, to verify cellular uptake of the contrast agent (gold nanorod) for PAI with bioluminescence. The whole organism under study is illuminated, but only the cells which have taken up the contrast agent will give a bioluminescent signal which is captured by a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera. In the first chapter, the background behind bioluminescence, a review of various luciferin analogues, selfimmolative linkers, and PAI is discussed. The second chapter deals with the synthesis of luciferin analogues used in this research. The subject of the third chapter is the synthesis of linkers as well as their conjugation to the analogues. The fourth chapter details the functionalisation and characterisation of gold nanorods. Their coating with luciferin-linker conjugates is the subject of the fifth chapter, as well as the preliminary BLI and PAI studies. The sixth chapter summarises the overall results and suggests future work. The final chapter gives experimental procedures and corresponding characterisation data. The thesis is fully referenced to the primary literature.

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