PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Elleard Felix Webster Heffern
AU  - Jason Fuller
AU  - Russell W. Hanson
TI  - The aptabot: an inducibly affinity-switching, minimally invasive <em>in vivo</em> contrast agent
AID  - 10.1101/043950
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 043950
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/16/043950.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/16/043950.full
AB  - The ambitions of current neuroscience—understanding neurological disease progression and mapping the connectome—demonstrate a need for safe in vivo tools for creating intricate maps of brain circuitry. Present in vivo contrast agents are often limited by their specificity, uptake, resolvability, and/or clearance.We describe an aptamer-functionalized sensor for high-resolution imaging that can switch imaging targets by an induced multi-stage aptamer reaction. Included are synthetic methods as well as calculations of sensor efficacy based on known kinetics. Calculations show that 10 distinct targets may be imaged in a living brain at the submicron scale within 42 hours.