Uncaging with visible light - Inorganic caged compounds

ZAYAT, L.; BARALDO, L.M.; ETCHENIQUE, R.

Imaging in Neuroscience and Development: A Laboratory Manual

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

Lugar: New York; Año: 2005; p. 391 - 394

The chemistry of metal-containing molecules offers a very wide range of photochemical reactions that led to a broad spectrum of applications, ranging from photography and lithography to light harvesting in solar cells.  Despite this fact, inorganic compounds have barely been used to achieve uncaging of biomolecules until very recently. Coordination compounds offer some advantages over organic substances. The fact that within the 90 stable or quasi-stable elements approximately 60 are metals or present metal-like behavior shows that a very rich chemistry may be expected for all these different elements.  Most metals can form complexes with several molecules (named ligands), and these  substances often present interesting photochemical properties, which  can be tuned by carefully selecting the properties of the ligands.In this chapter, we present a brief panorama of metal-based caged compounds and their advantages, arising from  chemical and physical properties.