Although there are some proposed explanations for aggregation-induced emission, a phenomenon with applications that range from biosensors to organic light-emitting diodes, current understanding of the quantum-mechanical origin of this photophysical behaviour is limited. To address this issue, we assessed the emission properties of a series of BF-hydrazone-based dyes as a function of solvent viscosity. These molecules turned out to be highly efficient fluorescent molecular rotors. This property, in addition to them being aggregation-induced emission luminogens, enabled us to probe deeper into their emission mechanism. Time-dependent density functional theory calculations and experimental results showed that the emission is not from the S state, as predicted from Kasha's rule, but from a higher energy (>S) state. Furthermore, we found that suppression of internal conversion to the dark S state by restricting the rotor rotation enhances fluorescence, which leads to the proposal that suppression of Kasha's rule is the photophysical mechanism responsible for emission in both viscous solution and the solid state.
Recent work by several groups has established that MhuD, IsdG, and IsdI are non-canonical heme oxygenases that induce significant out-of-plane ruffling distortions of their heme substrates enroute to mycobilin or staphylobilin formation. However, clear explanations for the observations of "nested" S = ½ VTVH MCD saturation magnetization curves at cryogenic temperatures, and exchange broadened (1)H NMR resonances at physiologically-relevant temperatures have remained elusive. Here, MCD and NMR data have been acquired for F23A and F23W MhuD-heme-CN, in addition to MCD data for IsdI-heme-CN, in order to complete assembly of a library of spectroscopic data for cyanide-inhibited ferric heme with a wide range of ruffling deformations. The spectroscopic data were used to evaluate a number of computational models for cyanide-inhibited ferric heme, which ultimately led to the development of an accurate NEVPT2/CASSCF model. The resulting model has a shallow, double-well potential along the porphyrin ruffling coordinate, which provides clear explanations for the unusual MCD and NMR data. The shallow, double-well potential also implies that MhuD-, IsdG-, and IsdI-bound heme is dynamic, and the functional implications of these dynamics are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.