Abstract
As amyloid fibril accumulation currently represents the key pathological evidence for a number of neurodegenerative disorders, a range of optical imaging probes have been developed in the past to visualize these infectious proteins. To some extent, they make it possible to characterize neuronal diseases in a postmortem state, that is, on sections of patients’ brains. However, many of the probes are of limited use for in vivo brain imaging, due to the lack of blood–brain barrier permeability and absorption/scattering of weak fluorescence signals deep in the neural tissue. Recently developed probes with significantly improved imaging properties partly amend such problems. These include near-infrared, two-photon, and phosphorescent imaging probes, as well as those selective for certain amyloid types, and for detecting enzymatic activity linked to the amyloid disease progression. Obviously, this has important medical implications, as a disease can be more reliably diagnosed and its progress detected at an early stage.
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Abbreviations
- AD:
-
Alzheimer’s disease
- APP:
-
Amyloid precursor protein
- Aβ:
-
Amyloid beta
- BBB:
-
Blood–brain barrier
- CR:
-
Congo red
- HOMO:
-
Highest occupied molecular orbital
- LUMO:
-
Lowest unoccupied molecular orbital
- PET:
-
Positron emission tomography
- PiB:
-
Pittsburgh compound B
- ThS/ThT:
-
Thioflavin S/T
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018K2A9A2A08000087, NRF-2019R1A2C3008463) and the Organelle Network Research Center (NRF-2017R1A5A1015366). HWR also acknowledges support from the KBRI basic research program through Korea Brain Research Institute funded by Ministry of Science and ICT (17-BR-01, 19-BR-04-01).
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Mishra, P.K., Kang, MG., Rhee, HW. (2020). Optical Imaging Probes for Amyloid Diseases in Brain. In: Pelc, R., Walz, W., Doucette, J.R. (eds) Neurohistology and Imaging Techniques. Neuromethods, vol 153. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0428-1_5
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