Coloring Afterglow Nanoparticles for High-Contrast Time-Gating-Free Multiplex Luminescence Imaging.

Afterglow nanoparticles (AGNPs) possessing inherently long lifetime with tailorable emission colors and uniform size have long been sought due to their time-gating-free high-contrast multiplexing imaging. Herein, via a straightforward template method, it is reported that such multicolor AGNPs can be accomplished. The resultant AGNPs exhibit a series of tunable afterglow emissions, including blue, yellow, green, and white. These multicolor AGNPs are found to be highly bright, enabling them to perform high-contrast multichannel afterglow imaging in vitro and in vivo without the use of any complicated time-gating algorithms or systems, which existing tools are unable to do.