MRI tags stick to molecules with chemical 'Velcro'

Imagine attaching a beacon to a drug molecule and following its journey through our winding innards, tracking just where and how it interacts with the chemicals in our bodies to help treat illnesses. Duke scientists may be closer to doing just that. They have developed a chemical tag that can be attached to molecules to make them light up under magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).This tag or "lightbulb" changes its frequency when the molecule interacts with another molecule, potentially allowing researchers to both locate the molecule in the body and see how it is metabolized. “RI methods are very sensitive to small changes in the chemical structure, so you can actually use these tags to directly image chemical transformations," said Thomas Theis, an assistant research professor in the chemistry department at Duke. Chemical tags that light up under MRI are not new. In 2016, the Duke team of Warren S. Warren's lab and Qiu Wang's lab created molecular lightbulbs for MRI that burn brighter and longer than any previously discovered. In a study published March 9 in Science Advances, the researchers report a new method for attaching tags to molecules, allowing them to tag molecules indirectly to a broader scope of molecules than they could before.