The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-two-month research fellowship by Dr. Heather A. Fogarty to work with Dr. Jean-Pierre Dutasta at Ecole Normale Superieure Lyon in France.
The proposed project aims to synthesize new cryptophanes with covalently bound luminophores and to study their photophysical properties to obtain an understanding of their applicability for use as sensors. The first research aspect concerns the design and synthesis of cryptophanes whose electronic emission and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) shift are suitable for detection in biosensor applications. The second aspect concerns the influence of a guest, contained in the cavity of a cryptophane, on the photophysical properties of the cage and of the fluorophore located outside the cavity. Preparation of these derivatives will utilize recently developed experimental procedures. The characterization of the new compounds is based on NMR spectroscopy (multi-nuclei and multidimensional techniques). Photophysical properties of the new derivatives will be investigated, in the presence or absence of a guest, by UV-Vis spectroscopy, steady-state and time-resolved fluorescence, and circular dichroism (for enantiopure compounds). The presence of a guest such as xenon in the solution containing the molecular probe should modify the photophysical properties (lifetime of the excited state, shift of the emission energy, etc.) of the cryptophane, and possibly the luminophore.
Since 1988, Dr. Dutasta and his group have been the principal researchers on cryptophanes, actively developing the chemistry of their remarkable binding properties towards guests that has resulted in a better understanding of molecular recognition phenomena and 10 publications in international journals since 2001.
