ABSTRACT
EuDOTA-tetraamide complexes as paraCEST agents offer an attractive platform for designing biological sensors and responsive agents. The early versions of these agents showed low sensitivity at temperature and power levels suitable for in vivo applications partly due to non-optimal water exchange rates. Here we report two new EuDOTA derivatives having glutamyl-phosphonate side arms that display the slowest water exchange rates of any other paraCEST agent reported so far. The advantages of such systems are demonstrated experimentally both in vitro and in vivo and DFT calculations were performed to help understand the physical-chemical reasons for this interesting behavior.
Subject(s)
Magnetic Resonance Imaging/methods , Water/chemistry , Animals , Contrast Media , Mice , Mice, SCID , Models, Molecular , Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy , Spectrum Analysis/methodsABSTRACT
Lanthanide complexes with DOTA-tetraglycinate (DOTA-(gly)4) heavily favor the square antiprismatic (SAP) coordination isomer in aqueous solution, a structural feature that has made them useful as water-based paraCEST agents. In an effort to create amide-based paraCEST agents with rapid water exchange rates, we prepared the analogous tetraglycinate complexes with DOTMA, a ligand known to favor the twisted square antiprismatic (TSAP) coordination structures. Unexpectedly, NMR investigations show that the LnDOTMA-(gly)4 complexes, like the LnDOTA-(gly)4 complexes, also favor the SAP isomers in solution. This observation led to density functional theory (DFT) calculations in order to identify the energy terms that favor the SAP structures in lanthanide complexes formed with macrocyclic DOTA- and DOTMA-tetraamide ligands. The DFT calculations revealed that, regardless the nature of the ligand, the TSAP isomers present more negative hydration energies than the SAP counterparts. The extent to which the TSAP isomer is stabilized varies, however, depending on the ligand structure, resulting in different isomeric populations in solution.