19 F Barcoding Enables Multiplex Detection of Biomarkers Associated with Organ Injury and Cancer.

Simultaneous detection of multiple biomarkers in complex environments is critical for the in-depth exploration of different biological processes, which is challenging for many current analytical methods due to various limitations. Herein, we report a strategy of 19 F barcoding which takes the advantages of 19 F's high magnetic resonance (MR) sensitivity, prompt signal response to environmental changes, negligible biological background, quantitative signal output, and multiplex capacity. A set of 19 F-barcoded sensors responding to different biomarkers involved in organ injury and cancer are designed, synthesized, and characterized. With these sensors, we accomplish concurrent assessment of different biomarkers in the samples collected from the mice with drug-induced liver/kidney injury or tumor, illustrating the feasibility of this approach for multiplexed detection of different biomarkers in complex environments during various biological processes.

Terminal and bridging fluorine ligands in TiF4 as studied by 19F NMR in solids.

To examine bonding nature of fluorine ligands in a metal coordinated system, 19F high-resolution solid-state NMR has been applied to TiF4, which bears both bridging and terminal fluorines. Observed 12 isotropic signals are assigned to 12 crystallographically different fluorines (6 terminal and 6 bridging fluorines) in TiF4 by referring to the calculated isotropic shifts using density functional theory (DFT). The isotropic chemical shift (δiso) for terminal F (FT) appears at high frequency (420-480 ppm from δ(CCl3F) = 0 ppm) with large shielding anisotropy Δσ ∼ 850 ppm. Whereas the δiso and Δσ values for bridging F (FB) are moderate; δiso ∼ 0-25 ppm and Δσ ∼ 250 ppm. The origin of the observed high-frequency shift for FT is ascribed to the second-order paramagnetic shift with increased covalency, shorter Ti-F bonds, and smaller energy difference between the occupied and vacant orbitals. Examination of the orientation of the shielding tensor relative to the molecular structure shows that the most deshielded component of the shielding tensor is oriented along the Ti-F bond. The characteristic orientation is consistent with a Ti-F σ bond formed by dYZ of Ti and pz of F. Further, we show that the selectively observed spinning sideband patterns and the theoretical patterns with the calculated Δσ and η (shielding asymmetry) values are not consistent with each other for FB, indicating deficiency of the present DFT calculation in evaluating Δσ.

Solvent-accessibility of discrete residue positions in the polypeptide hormone glucagon by 19F-NMR observation of 4-fluorophenylalanine.

The amino acid 4-fluoro-L-phenylalanine (4F-Phe) was introduced at the positions of Phe6 and Phe22 in the 29-residue polypeptide hormone glucagon by expressing glucagon in E. coli in the presence of an excess of 4F-Phe. Glucagon regulates blood glucose homeostasis by interaction with the glucagon receptor (GCGR), a class B GPCR. By referencing to the 4F-Phe chemical shifts at varying D2O concentrations, the solvent exposure of the two Phe sites along the glucagon sequence was determined, showing that 4F-Phe6 was fully solvent exposed and 4F-Phe22 was only partially exposed. The incorporation of fluorine atoms in polypeptide hormones paves the way for novel studies of their interactions with membrane-spanning receptors, specifically by differentiating between effects on the solvent accessibility, the line shapes, and the chemical shifts from interactions with lipids, detergents and proteins. Studies of interactions of GCGR with ligands in solution is at this point of keen interest, given that recent crystallographic studies revealed that an apparent small molecule antagonist actually binds as an allosteric effector at a distance of ~20 Å from the orthosteric ligand binding site (Jazayeri et al., in Nature 533:274-277, 2016).

Probing different perfluorocarbons for in vivo inflammation imaging by 19F MRI: image reconstruction, biological half-lives and sensitivity.

Inflammatory processes can reliably be assessed by (19)F MRI using perfluorocarbons (PFCs), which is primarily based on the efficient uptake of emulsified PFCs by circulating cells of the monocyte-macrophage system and subsequent infiltration of the (19)F-labeled cells into affected tissue. An ideal candidate for the sensitive detection of fluorine-loaded cells is the biochemically inert perfluoro-15-crown-5 ether (PFCE), as it contains 20 magnetically equivalent (19)F atoms. However, the biological half-life of PFCE in the liver and spleen is extremely long, and so this substance is not suitable for future clinical applications. In the present study, we investigated alternative, nontoxic PFCs with predicted short biological half-lives and high fluorine content: perfluorooctyl bromide (PFOB), perfluorodecalin (PFD) and trans-bis-perfluorobutyl ethylene (F-44E). Despite the complex spectra of these compounds, we obtained artifact-free images using sine-squared acquisition-weighted three-dimensional chemical shift imaging and dedicated reconstruction accomplished with in-house-developed software. The signal-to-noise ratio of the images was maximized using a Nutall window with only moderate localization error. Using this approach, the retention times of the different PFCs in murine liver and spleen were determined at 9.4 T. The biological half-lives were estimated to be 9 days (PFD), 12 days (PFOB) and 28 days (F-44E), compared with more than 250 days for PFCE. In vivo sensitivity for inflammation imaging was assessed using an ear clip injury model. The alternative PFCs PFOB and F-44E provided 37% and 43%, respectively, of the PFCE intensities, whereas PFD did not show any signal in the ear model. Thus, for in vivo monitoring of inflammatory processes, PFOB emerges as the most promising candidate for possible future translation of (19)F MR inflammation imaging to human applications.

Free variable selection QSPR study to predict (19)F chemical shifts of some fluorinated organic compounds using Random Forest and RBF-PLS methods.

In this work, two new and powerful chemometrics methods are applied for the modeling and prediction of the (19)F chemical shift values of some fluorinated organic compounds. The radial basis function-partial least square (RBF-PLS) and random forest (RF) are employed to construct the models to predict the (19)F chemical shifts. In this study, we didn't used from any variable selection method and RF method can be used as variable selection and modeling technique. Effects of the important parameters affecting the ability of the RF prediction power such as the number of trees (nt) and the number of randomly selected variables to split each node (m) were investigated. The root-mean-square errors of prediction (RMSEP) for the training set and the prediction set for the RBF-PLS and RF models were 44.70, 23.86, 29.77, and 23.69, respectively. Also, the correlation coefficients of the prediction set for the RBF-PLS and RF models were 0.8684 and 0.9313, respectively. The results obtained reveal that the RF model can be used as a powerful chemometrics tool for the quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) studies.