鉴于神经干/祖细胞（NSPCs）在发育中和成人大脑以及疾病（例如脑瘤）中的重要性在神经系统疾病的预后、诊断和治疗中具有潜在的临床意义，迫切需要简单、非侵入性的NSPCs识别方法。在此，我们报告了一种名为p-HTMI的发光共轭寡噻吩（LCO），用于非侵入性和非扩增的实时检测活体来源的人类脑胶质母细胞瘤（GBM）干细胞样细胞和NSPCs。虽然p-HTMI仅染色了所研究的其他细胞类型的一小部分，但只需向细胞培养中加入p-HTMI，就能在几分钟内有效地检测到啮齿动物和人类的NSPCs或GBM细胞。p-HTMI带有类似组氨酸/组胺侧链的甲基化咪唑基团，非甲基化类似物没有功能。人类GBM细胞的细胞分选实验表明，p-HTMI标记了与CD271相同的细胞群体，CD271是脑胶质母细胞瘤中干细胞样细胞和快速迁移细胞的标记物。我们的结果表明，LCO p-HTMI是一种多功能工具，可立即、有选择性地检测神经和胶质瘤干细胞和祖细胞。

There is an urgent need for simple and non-invasive identification of live neural stem/progenitor cells (NSPCs) in the developing and adult brain as well as in disease, such as in brain tumors, due to the potential clinical importance in prognosis, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases of the nervous system. Here, we report a luminescent conjugated oligothiophene (LCO), named p-HTMI, for non-invasive and non-amplified real-time detection of live human patient-derived glioblastoma (GBM) stem cell-like cells and NSPCs. While p-HTMI stained only a small fraction of other cell types investigated, the mere addition of p-HTMI to the cell culture resulted in efficient detection of NSPCs or GBM cells from rodents and humans within minutes. p-HTMI is functionalized with a methylated imidazole moiety resembling the side chain of histidine/histamine, and non-methylated analogues were not functional. Cell sorting experiments of human GBM cells demonstrated that p-HTMI labeled the same cell population as CD271, a proposed marker for stem cell-like cells and rapidly migrating cells in glioblastoma. Our results suggest that the LCO p-HTMI is a versatile tool for immediate and selective detection of neural and glioma stem and progenitor cells.