LAUSR

Abstract The fluorescent organic nanoparticles (FONs) with aggregation-induced emission (AIE) feature have recently attracted the most research interest owing to their well designability, outstanding optical properties and great potential for biomedical applications. Therefore, the development of novel strategies that could facilely fabricate AIE-active functional materials with high efficiency should be of great importance for their biomedical applications. In this work, a novel strategy that based on the microwave-assisted multicomponent tandem polymerization (MCP) has been developed to fabricate the biodegradable FONs with AIE feature. The AIE-active dye (NH2-PhE-NH2) with two amino groups, hydrophilic dialdehyde-terminating copolymer (PEG-PCL-CHO) and diethyl phosphite were successfully conjugated via a “one-pot” microwave-assisted Kabachnik–Fields (KF) reaction under rather mild conditions (e.g. air atmosphere, catalysts-free and solvent-free) within short reaction time (5 min). The obtained PEG-PCL-PhE FONs were characterized by a series of techniques. Results demonstrated that PEG-PCL-PhE FONs possess great water dispersibility, excellent optical properties as well as low cytotoxicity. Taken together, we developed a novel MCP strategy that based on the microwave-assisted KF reaction to fabricate AIE-active FONs with great physicochemical and biological properties. These AIE-active FONs are of great potential for biological imaging applications. Moreover, this strategy could also be adopted to fabricate many other AIE-active functional materials owing to its simple operation, high efficiency, short reaction time and substrate diversity.