Among imaging technologies, near-infrared fluorescence imaging has been dedicated immense attention owing to its low absorption and auto-fluorescence from surrounding organism and tissues in this specific spectral region (650-900 nm), the so-called “biological window”.

The overall target of the project is to develop new low-energy emissive dyes that can be used in imaging of living cells, targeting specific parts of the cell.

More in particular, we are focusing on heteroleptic dipyrrinato metal complexes, molecular architectures that have the advantage to work on two different chelating units, which allows an increased freedom in tailoring the dye for diverse types  

Moreover, due to their heteroleptic nature, there is no thermal transition to the non-radiative charge-separation excited state, so their emission is independent of solvent polarity.