Novel easily available purine-based AIEgens with colour tunability and applications in lipid droplet imaging.

Recently, tetraphenylethene, triphenylamine and other man-made core AIE luminescent materials (AIEgens) have attracted significant scientific interest. However, the design and synthesis of natural product based, facile and color tunable AIEgens remains challenging. Herein, a novel series of AIEgens based on purine-core molecular rotors is reported, which can be facilely synthesized and shows color tunable emission. Moreover, these purine-based AIEgens exhibit lipid droplet specific properties in live cellular imaging with low background, high selectivity and excellent biocompatibility.