An Aggregation-Induced Emission-Based Dual Emitting Nanoprobe for Detecting Intracellular pH and Unravelling Metabolic Variations in Differentiating Lymphocytes

Monitoring T lymphocyte differentiation is essential for understanding T cell fate regulation and advancing adoptive T cell immunotherapy. However, current biomarker analysis methods necessitate cell lysis, leading to source depletion. Intracellular pH (pH i ) can be affected by the presence of lactic acid (LA), a metabolic mediator of T cell activity such as glycolysis during T cell activation; therefore, it is a potentially a good biomarker of T cell state. In this work, a dual emitting enhancement-based nanoprobe, namely, AIEgen@F127-AptCD8, was developed to accurately detect the pH i of T cells to “read” the T cell differentiation process. The nanocore of this probe comprises a pair of AIE dyes, TPE-AMC (pH-sensitive moiety) and TPE-TCF, that form a donor–acceptor pair for sensitive detection of pH i by dual emitting enhancement analysis. The nanoprobe exhibits a distinctly sensitive narrow range of pH i values (from 6.0 to 7.4) that can precisely distinguish the differentiated lymphocytes from naïve ones based on their distinct pH i profiles. Activated CD8+ T cells demonstrate lower pH i (6.49 ± 0.09) than the naïve cells (7.26 ± 0.11); Jurkat cells exhibit lower pH i (6.43 ± 0.06) compared to that of nonactivated ones (7.29 ± 0.09) on 7 days post-activation. The glycolytic product profiles in T cells strongly correlate with their pH i profiles, ascertaining the reliability of probing pH i for predicting T cell states. The specificity and dynamic detection capabilities of this nanoprobe make it a promising tool for indirectly and noninvasively monitoring T cell activation and differentiation states.