Spectrochimica Acta Part A:  Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy,July2022, 121616,

Yuxia Zou, Xianghui Chen , Ziyi Cheng【程子译】 , Hongwei Chen, Jinsheng Wu, Heng Liu *【刘恒】Qing Ye*

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) originating from the epithelium cells is the most common malignant tumor of  the head and neck. Small-molecule fluorescent probes for early diagnosis of NPC can effectively improve the 5-  year survival rate of patients, which makes it become a research hotspot in recent years. Previous studies have  suggested the expression levels of NTR in hypoxic tissues or cells and tumors increased relative to the normal  state and were positively correlated with the degree of hypoxia. Regarding the mentioned above, we designed a  two-photon fluorescent probe NaT-NTR for the detection of NTR in nasopharyngeal cell lines and tissues at  different hypoxia levels. NaT-NTR showed high selectivity and sensitivity toward NTR in a complex physiological  environment. Furthermore, imaging NTR in different cell lines revealed that the level of intracellular NTR might  successfully applied to detect and image NTR in human nasopharyngeal carcinoma with a penetration depth of  100 µm. On this basis, NaT-NTR might be a powerful chemical tool for the early diagnosis of nasopharyngeal  carcinoma.