@article{Liu2025, 
author = {Yisheng Liu and Yingying Shi and Luman You and Jianlei Qian and Chu Hao and Yong Zhong and Jiayin Wang and Feng Bai and Xiaoyan Yang},
title = {Controllable assembly of porphyrin/perylene imide for near-infrared photothermal antibacteria},
year = {2025},
journal = {Nano Research},
volume = {18},
number = {10},
pages = {94907835},
keywords = {photothermal therapy, near-infrared, tetraminophenyl porphyrin, N,N'-di(L-alanine) perylene diimide},
url = {https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/NR.2025.94907835},
doi = {10.26599/NR.2025.94907835},
abstract = {Porphyrins suffer from visible light excitation, which seriously restricts photothermal therapy (PTT) to superficial lesions. Developing porphyrin derivatives with near-infrared (NIR) absorption via chemical synthesis requires complicated synthesis and purification. In this work, the electron acceptor N,N'-di(L-alanine) perylene diimide (PDI) was introduced to the electron donor tetraminophenyl porphyrin (TAPP) to prepare the charge-transfer TAPP/PDI nanoparticles (NPs) as an NIR activatable photothermal agent via a simple and efficient nanoprecipitation method. When the molar ratio of TAPP to PDI was 1:2, uniformly dispersed TAPP/PDI NPs were obtained with a new NIR absorption peak (758 nm), along with fluorescence emission quenching. These results indicated that the charge transfer from the donor to the acceptor occurred within the TAPP/PDI NPs. The co-assembly forces were proven to originate from π−π interactions and hydrogen bond interactions, according to experiment results and molecular dynamic simulation. Furthermore, the energy gap of TAPP/PDI dimer was significantly narrowed, however, the spin-orbit coupling (SOC) constant was too small for intersystem crossing, which in favor of the NIR light activated non-radiative transition of TAPP/PDI NPs. Consistent with theoretical calculations, TAPP/PDI NPs could effectively generate heat with photothermal conversion efficiency (PCE) of 36.5% under the illumination of 808 nm laser. Antibacterial experiments demonstrated that TAPP/PDI NPs could induce the death of both Gram-positive S. aureus bacteria and Gram-negative E. coli bacteria, and could eradicate S. aureus infection in mice after only one treatment. Therefore, supramolecular co-assembly affords a facile approach for fabricating NIR activated porphyrin-based photothermal agents (PTAs) for photothermal therapy and beyond.}
}