%0 Journal Article
%T Activated alkyne-enabled turn-on click bioconjugation with cascade signal amplification for ultrafast and high-throughput antibiotic screening.
%A Lv S
%A Wang C
%A Xue K
%A Wang J
%A Xiao M
%A Sun Z
%A Han L
%A Shi L
%A Zhu C
%J Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
%V 120
%N 27
%D 2023 07 4
%M 37364107
%F 12.779
%R 10.1073/pnas.2302367120
%X Antimicrobial susceptibility testing plays a pivotal role in the discovery of new antibiotics. However, the development of simple, sensitive, and rapid assessment approaches remains challenging. Herein, we report an activated alkyne-based cascade signal amplification strategy for ultrafast and high-throughput antibiotic screening. First of all, a novel water-soluble aggregation-induced emission (AIE) luminogen is synthesized, which contains an activated alkyne group to enable fluorescence turn-on and metal-free click bioconjugation under physiological conditions. Taking advantage of the in-house established method for bacterial lysis, a number of clickable biological substances (i.e., bacterial solutes and debris) are released from the bacterial bodies, which remarkably increases the quantity of analytes. By means of the activated alkyne-mediated turn-on click bioconjugation, the system fluorescence signal is significantly amplified due to the increased labeling sites as well as the AIE effect. Such a cascade signal amplification strategy efficiently improves the detection sensitivity and thus enables ultrafast antimicrobial susceptibility assessment. By integration with a microplate reader, this approach is further applied to high-throughput antibiotic screening.