Search results for "Photoswitch"
showing 10 items of 13 documents
N,N′-Disubstituted Indigos as Readily Available Red-Light Photoswitches with Tunable Thermal Half-Lives
2017
Some rare indigo derivatives have been known for a long time to be photochromic upon irradiation with red light, which should be advantageous for many applications. However, the absence of strategies to tune their thermal half-lives by modular molecular design as well as the lack of proper synthetic methods to prepare a variety of such molecules from the parent indigo dye have so far precluded their use. In this work, several synthetic protocols for N-functionalization have been developed, and a variety of N-alkyl and N-aryl indigo derivatives have been prepared. By installation of electron-withdrawing substituents on the N-aryl moieties, the thermal stability of the Z-isomers could be enha…
A photoswitchable helical peptide with light-controllable interface/transmembrane topology in lipidic membranes
2021
Summary The spontaneous insertion of helical transmembrane (TM) polypeptides into lipid bilayers is driven by three sequential equilibria: solution-to-membrane interface (MI) partition, unstructured-to-helical folding, and MI-to-TM helix insertion. A bottleneck for understanding these three steps is the lack of experimental approaches to perturb membrane-bound hydrophobic polypeptides out of equilibrium rapidly and reversibly. Here, we report on a 24-residues-long hydrophobic α-helical polypeptide, covalently coupled to an azobenzene photoswitch (KCALP-azo), which displays a light-controllable TM/MI equilibrium in hydrated lipid bilayers. FTIR spectroscopy reveals that trans KCALP-azo folds…
Tuning Azoheteroarene Photoswitch Performance through Heteroaryl Design
2017
International audience; Photoswitchable compounds, which can be reversibly switched between two isomers by light, continue to attract significant attention for a wide array of applications. Azoheteroarenes represent a relatively new but understudied type of photoswitch, where one of the aryl rings from the conventional azobenzene class has been replaced with a five-membered heteroaromatic ring. Initial studies have suggested the azoheteroarenes – the arylazopyrazoles in particular – to have excellent photoswitching properties (quantitative switching and long Z isomer half-life). Here we present a systematic computational and experimental study to elucidate the origin of the long thermal hal…
A photoswitchable helical peptide with light-controllable interface / transmembrane topology in lipidic membranes
2021
AbstractAccording to the three-step model, the spontaneous insertion and folding of helical transmembrane (TM) polypeptides into lipid bilayers is driven by three sequential equilibria: solution-to-membrane interface (MI) partition, unstructured-to-helical folding, and MI-to-TM helix insertion. However, understanding these three steps with molecular detail has been challenged by the lack of suitable experimental approaches to rapidly and reversibly perturb membrane-bound hydrophobic polypeptides out of equilibrium. Here, we report on a 24-residues-long hydrophobic α-helical polypeptide, covalently coupled to an azobenzene photoswitch (KCALP-azo), which displays a light-controllable TM/MI eq…
Photo-switching and -cyclisation of hydrogen bonded liquid crystals based on resveratrol
2020
A series of hydrogen-bonded liquid crystals based on resveratrol and resveratrone is reported and investigated with respect to their photo-switchability (at 405 nm) and photo-cyclisation (at 300 nm).
Light-responsive hybrid material based on luminescent core-shell quantum dots and steroidal organogel
2016
We report the synthesis of a smart novel hybrid with reversible photoswitchable luminescence properties modulated by light. The combination of a low molecular weight organogelator (LMOG) and CdSe/ZnS core-shell semiconductor nanoparticles capped with trioctylphosphine oxide ligands produces a luminescent, stable and transparent material. Modulation of the luminescence properties was successfully achieved using a diarylethene photochromic compound, with good resistance to fatigue ca. 22 cycles. Interestingly, the morphology of the organogel fibers was preserved in the hybrid, while a partial luminescence quenching of the nanoparticle was observed. This material could have implication for on-…
Wavelength-Gated Adaptation of Hydrogel Properties via Photo-Dynamic Multivalency in Associative Star Polymers.
2020
Abstract Responsive materials, such as switchable hydrogels, have been largely engineered for maximum changes between two states. In contrast, adaptive systems target distinct functional plateaus between these maxima. Here, we demonstrate how the photostationary state (PSS) of an E/Z‐arylazopyrazole photoswitch can be tuned by the incident wavelength across a wide color spectrum, and how this behavior can be exploited to engineer the photo‐dynamic mechanical properties of hydrogels based on multivalent photoswitchable interactions. We show that these hydrogels adapt to the wavelength‐dependent PSS and the number of arylazopyrazole units by programmable relationships. Hence, our material des…
Trans-to-cis photoisomerization of cyclocurcumin in different environments rationalized by computational photochemistry
2020
International audience; Cyclocurcumin is a turmeric component that attracted much less attention compared to the well known curcumin. In spite of the less deep charcaterization of its properties, cyclocurcumin has shown promising anticancer effects when used in combination with curcumin. Especially, due to its peculiar molecular structure, cyclocurcumin can be regarded as an almost ideal photoswitch, whose capabilities can also be exploited for relevant biological applications. Here, by means of state-of-the-art computational methods for electronic excited-state calculations (TD-DFT, MS-CASPT2, XMS-CASPT2) we analyze in detail the absorption and photoisomerization pathways leading from the …
A NOT gate in a cis-trans photoisomerization model
2007
We numerically study the implementation of a NOT gate by laser pulses in a model molecular system presenting two electronic surfaces coupled by non adiabatic interactions. The two states of the bit are the fundamental states of the cis-trans isomers of the molecule. The gate is classical in the sense that it involves a one-qubit flip so that the encoding of the outputs is based on population analysis which does not take the phases into account. This gate can also be viewed as a double photo-switch process with the property that the same electric field controls the two isomerizations. As an example, we consider one-dimensional cuts in a model of the retinal in rhodopsin already proposed in t…
Supramolecular hierarchy among halogen and hydrogen bond donors in light-induced surface patterning
2015
Halogen bonding, a noncovalent interaction possessing several unique features compared to the more familiar hydrogen bonding, is emerging as a powerful tool in functional materials design. Herein, we unambiguously show that one of these characteristic features, namely high directionality, renders halogen bonding the interaction of choice when developing azobenzene-containing supramolecular polymers for light-induced surface patterning. The study is conducted by using an extensive library of azobenzene molecules that differ only in terms of the bond-donor unit. We introduce a new tetrafluorophenol-containing azobenzene photoswitch capable of forming strong hydrogen bonds, and show that an io…