Pentacyclic analogues of the potent voltage-gated sodium ion channel agonist batrachotoxin can be accessed through an intermediate furan by exploiting Diels-Alder cycloaddition reactions with ring-strained dienophiles. The use of 3-bromofuran as a 1,2-dianion equivalent, the application of carbamate reductive N-alkylation for homomorpholine ring assembly, and the demonstration of CsF as an effe...

Photodissociation dynamics for various tryptophan chromophores was studied at 193 or 248 nm using multimass ion imaging techniques. The competition between internal conversion to the ground electronic state and dissociation from the repulsive excited state reveals size-dependent photostability for these amino acid chromophores. As the size of chromophore increases, internal conversion to the gr...

The development of a new method for the regioselective synthesis of functionalized indoles and six-membered benzo-fused N-, O-, and S-heterocycles is reported. The key step involves the generation of a benzyne-tethered vinyl or aryllithium compound that undergoes a subsequent intramolecular anionic cyclization. Reaction of the organolithium intermediates with selected electrophiles allows the p...

The high temperature decomposition kinetics of toluene and benzyl were investigated by combining a kinetic analysis with the ab initio/master equation study of new reaction channels. It was found that similarly to toluene, which decomposes to benzyl and phenyl losing atomic hydrogen and methyl, also benzyl decomposition proceeds through two channels with similar products. The first leads to the...

Alternating the sequence of thiophene-based ?-conjugation bridge push–pull chromophores significantly improves vectorial component first hyperpolarizabilities and polar order molecules for large electro-optic activities poled films.

Intramolecular Förster-type excitation energy transfer (FRET) processes in a series of first-generation polyphenylene dendrimers substituted with spatially well-separated peryleneimide chromophores and a terryleneimide energy-trapping chromophore at the rim were investigated by steady-state and time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy. Energy-hopping processes among the peryleneimide chromophore...

A method was developed for the synthesis of α-alkyl, α-aryl-bislactim ethers in good to excellent yields and high diastereoselectivities, consisting of a facile one-pot procedure in which the aryl group is introduced by means of a nucleophilic addition to benzyne and the alkyl group by alkylation of a resultant benzylic anion. Hydrolysis of the sterically less hindered adducts gave the correspo...

Photoacoustic tomography is a rapidly growing imaging modality that can provide images of high spatial resolution and high contrast at depths up to 5 cm. We report here the design, synthesis, and evaluation of an activatable probe that shows great promise for enabling detection of the cleaved probe in the presence of high levels of nonactivated, uncleaved probe, a difficult task to attain in ab...