Our Dye Platform
We have developed a novel dye technology tailored for extracellular vesicle (EVs), liposomes, or lipid-enveloed viruses.
What makes AcoDyes ideal for your nano-vesicle research?
Highly water-soluble: No need for organic solvents like DMSO or ethanol.
Highly specific: They exhibit intelligent fluorogenic behavior and light up only when bound to the lipid bilayer.
No aggregation or background signal: Owing to its intelligent nature and high solubility, unbound dye does not fluoresce and no aggregates are formed in aqueous solution.
Diverse Color Options: AcoDyes are available in 5 colors with distinct excitation / emission spectra, ensuring compatibility with most lasers and optical filter sets and enables multiplexing in fluorescence-based applications.
AcoDyes have been validated across all EV applications:
Flow Cytometry
As shown here, the dye-only control for AcoDyes in flow cytometry analysis exhibits minimal signal. This is due to its selective fluorogenic property: the dyes do not fluoresce unless they are bound to a lipid bilayer.
Traditionally used lipophilic dyes, such as the PKH-26, form dye aggregates which express their own signal even in the absence of EVs.
Researchers cannot be sure if their signals are coming from their EVs or are false positives from dye aggregates.
EV Cell Uptake Studies
Here, PC3 exosomes were labeled with AcoDyes and purified using the Amicon 100KDa filter before they were added to A549 cells, incubated, and analyzed on Imagestream (Amnis).
AcoDye-labeled exosomes were observed as spots (green). In the absence of exosomes, no fluorescence was observed in the cells because all the free dye were removed.
By contrast, micelles of DiD dye were not purified and thus there was still fluorescence observed from the cells, suggesting the uptake of the dye aggregates which can be mistaken for DiD-labeled exosomes instead.
Ex Vivo and In Vivo EV Tracking
Here, the Aco-490 was used in analysing trafficking patterns of RBCEVs, revealing their preferential uptake by specific cells. This discovery offers insights into potential therapeutic applications of RBCEVs for multiple disease states including atherosclerosis and inflammation.