Fully understanding the complicated interplays among various chemical species and organelles is greatly important to unravel the mystery of life. However, fluorescent probes capable of visualizing multiple targets discriminatively are severely deficient, which extremely limit the investigation on intracellular interplays among various species. Towards this end and in consideration of the unique advantages of aggregation-induced emission luminogens (AIEgens), here we rationally designed and presented a single AIEgen, named TVQE, bearing lipophilic, cationic and hydrolyzable moieties, and this AIEgen was capable of illuminating mitochondria and lipid droplets with red and blue emission, respectively. In addition, TVQE was successfully used for evaluating cell viability due to its distinct two-color emission changes tuned by esterase-mediated hydrolysis. Of particular importance is that TVQE can selectively differentiate live, early apoptotic, late apoptotic, and dead cells by confocal microscopy and quantify cell viability statistically by flow cytometry.

充分了解各种化学物质和细胞器之间复杂的相互作用对于解开生命之谜非常重要。然而，能够区分地可视化多个目标的荧光探针严重不足，这极大地限制了对不同物种之间细胞内相互作用的研究。为此，考虑到聚集诱导发光发光剂（AIEgens）的独特优势，我们合理设计并提出了一种带有亲脂性、阳离子和可水解部分的单一AIEgen，命名为TVQE，该AIEgen能够照亮线粒体和分别发射红色和蓝色的脂滴。此外，由于通过酯酶介导的水解调节其独特的双色发射变化，TVQE 已成功用于评估细胞活力。特别重要的是，TVQE 可以通过共聚焦显微镜选择性地区分活细胞、早期凋亡细胞、晚期凋亡细胞和死细胞，并通过流式细胞术对细胞活力进行统计量化。