Abstract
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.
Copyright
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
Posted March 16, 2016.
The aptabot: an inducibly affinity-switching, minimally invasive in vivo contrast agent
