A facile strategy to construct biocompatible fluorescent nanoparticles for intracellular bioimaging

Coumarins are widely used in many fields due to their excellent photostability, high fluorescence quantum yield and easy modification of the backbone, and its derivatives possess great technological potential especially in biomaterials field. However, many fluorescent materials constructed on the basis of coumarin skeletons have poor biocompatibility, which limits their application in the biomedical field, and the increasing demand for coumarin derivatives accelerates the research in biological and chemical synthesis to provide biocompatible and scalable materials of coumarins. In this work, we reported a facile strategy to construct fluorescent nanoparticles by using Stober method by incorporating silane-modified coumarin derivatives, and the polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) is introduced to enhance the biocompatibility of the material while obtaining homogeneous and stable fluorescent nanoparticles. Overall, this provides new ideas and methods for the preparation of simple and homogeneous fluorescent nanoparticles and the enhancement of biocompatibility.