The study of the underlying mechanism of aggregation-induced emission (AIE), design and synthesis of novel AIE molecules and their application in various fields of daily life are the current hot research topics. According to AIE mechanism of restriction of intramolecular motions, a variety of AIE probes with "turn-on" sensing feature have been designed to provide much lower background and higher signal reliability, which are particularly attractive and suitable for use in biology. Since the unbound AIE probes have a low background, the use of the AIE bioprobes also has the advantage of not requiring washing steps, which greatly saves the operation time and eliminates the loss of the samples. The formed AIE aggregates have excellent photostability and resistance to photobleaching during detection, allowing long-term tracking and monitoring. AIE bioprobes have been designed and applied to fields of biomolecular detection, cellular structure imaging, bacterial imaging, cell tracking, angiography, in vivo tumor imaging and therapy, etc. With the recently achieved numerous results, herein, we first briefly introduce the origin of AIE, then we discuss the working mechanism of AIE and the construction of AIE probes. Finally we summarize the recent works of AIE in different aspects of bioimaging, disease diagnosis and treatment.

aggregation-induced emission  /  fluorescent probes  /  bioimaging  /  disease diagnosis  /  cancer therapy