Shining Light on Molecules
Prof. Petr Klán
Department of Chemistry
Faculty of Science
Masaryk University
Kamenice 5, 625 00 Brno, Czech Republic
The lecture will demonstrate the underlying principles of the photochemistry of organic compounds, discuss key photochemical techniques to study reactive intermediates, and illustrate some synthetic photochemical procedures.
The second part will be devoted to photoactivatable compounds, or caged compounds, which, upon photoactivation, irreversibly release a species possessing desirable physical, chemical, or biological qualities. Only a few known photoactivatable systems can be activated directly by visible/NIR light because the delivered excitation energy is in principle too low for a covalent bond cleavage. We have introduced several new chromophores absorbing in the region of 600−1100 nm that can release biologically relevant species, for example, H2S or CO as gaseous signalling molecules. The design, photoreaction mechanisms, spectroscopy and biological applications of these systems will be presented.