Title: Main-Group pie -Materials for Organic Electronics and Bioimaging

Abstrac:

Incorporation of main group elements into p-conjugated skeletons is a powerful design strategy to develop new optoelectronic organic materials. Making best use of an orbital interaction between a p-skeleton and a main-group element moiety enables us to produce intriguing p-skeletons with unusual electronic structure. To gain an optimal orbital interaction, conformational constraint often plays a crucial role. In addition, this is also important to gain high chemical and/or photo-stability. Based on this design strategy, we have so far synthesized various types of functional p-electron materials. For example, we have found that the structural constraint of the skeleton into a planar and rigid fashion resulted in stabilization of boron-containing pi-electron systems, based on which we have succeeded in the development of a boron-stabilized triphenylmethyl radical with ambipolar charge carrier transport properties.[2] We have also developed a series of P=O-containing ladder-type p-electron systems, which can show exceptionally high photostability, and thereby can be employed as promising fluorescent dyes for super-resolution STED imaging.[3] In particular, MytoPB Yellow, we recently synthesized, allowed the visualization of mitochondrial ultrastructure and dynamics in living cells.[4]