Research
1, Vibrational Optical Activity in Coordination Compounds
Raman optical activity (ROA) instrument can be conveniently used for lanthanide circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) measurement.
Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2015, 54, 14933-14936 ; Anal. Chem. 2017, 89, 5043–5049 .
2, Lanthanide Chiroptical Spectroscopy in Structural Studies of Biomolecules
The advantage of ROA is a strong laser excitation and sensitive detection of the circular polarization. Particularly sensitive are the 5D0 → 7F0 emission and 5D0 → 7F1 CPL bands. Recently, we used the CPL/ROA technique for lanthanide-based sensing of biomolecules such as amino acids and proteins (Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2016, 18 (34), 23803-23811), oligopeptides (Chem. Eur. J. 2018, 24, 8664 – 8669; ), saccharides (Chem. Commun. 2018, 54, 1790-1792; Anal. Chem. 2016, 88 (17), 8878-8885), and nucleic acids (Sci. Rep. 2019, 9, 1068.).
3, Spectral Counterstaining in Luminescence-enhanced Raman Imaging of Living Cells
Cell imaging heavily depends on fluorescent labels typically incompatible with Raman microscopy. The europium(III) complex based on dipicolinic acid (DPA) presented here is an exception from this rule. Although its luminescence bands are very narrow, their intensity is comparable to the background Raman bands. This makes it complementary to less luminous compounds referred to as Raman tags. In several examples (e.g. HeLa cells and pollen grains) we show that the complex provides a morphological context in otherwise unstained cells, thus acting as a spectral-counterstaining agent.
