TY - JOUR T1 - The aptabot: an inducibly affinity-switching, minimally invasive <em>in vivo</em> contrast agent JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/043950 SP - 043950 AU - Elleard Felix Webster Heffern AU - Jason Fuller AU - Russell W. Hanson Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/16/043950.abstract N2 - The ambitions of current neuroscience—understanding neurological disease progression and mapping the connectome—demonstrate a need for safe in vivo tools for creating intricate maps of brain circuitry. Present in vivo contrast agents are often limited by their specificity, uptake, resolvability, and/or clearance.We describe an aptamer-functionalized sensor for high-resolution imaging that can switch imaging targets by an induced multi-stage aptamer reaction. Included are synthetic methods as well as calculations of sensor efficacy based on known kinetics. Calculations show that 10 distinct targets may be imaged in a living brain at the submicron scale within 42 hours. ER -