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. 2019 Jun 12;9:8550. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-44873-1

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© The Author(s) 2019

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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QC1 pH low insertion peptide (pHLIP) targets acidity at the surface of cancer cells and allows multi-spectral optoacoustic imaging. (a) Schematic of var3 pHLIP at three distinct conditions (left to right). pHLIP is unstructured in aqueous solution at physiological pH (state I) and it binds to the surface of a cell membrane (state II). At acidic pH, pHLIP changes into an α-helix conformation and inserts in between the membrane with the C-terminal found within the intracellular space and the N-terminal extruding towards the extracellular space. (b) The structure of IRDye QC1 conjugated to the N-terminal of var3 pHLIP. (c) High performance liquid chromatogram (HPLC) at 280 nm of QC1 var3 pHLIP.