There is a dire need for new compounds to combat antibiotic resistance: metal complexes might provide the solution. 906 metal complexes were evaluated against dangerous ESKAPE pathogens and found to have a higher hit-rate than organic molecules.

Bioconjugation techniques using organic azides are compared in this critical review. A particular focus is on chemical ligation reactions and their application to chemical biology (179 references).

While the Staudinger reaction has first been described a hundred years ago in 1919, the ligation reaction became one of the most important and efficient bioconjugation techniques in the 1990s and this century. It holds the crucial characteristics for bioorthogonal chemistry: biocompatibility, selectivity, and a rapid and high-yielding turnover for a wide variety of applications. In the past years, it has been used especially in chemical biology for peptide/protein synthesis, posttranslational modifications, and DNA labeling. Furthermore, it can be used for cell-surface engineering, development of microarrays, and drug delivery systems. However, it is also possible to use the reaction in synthetic chemistry for general formation of amide bonds. In this review, the three major types, traceless and nontraceless Staudinger Ligation as well as the Staudinger phosphite reaction, are described in detail. We will further illustrate each reaction mechanism and describe characteristic substrates, intermediates, and products. In addition, not only its advantages but also stereochemical aspects, scope, and limitations, in particular side reactions, are discussed. Finally, the method is compared to other bioorthogonal labeling methods.

organic/inorganic perovskites solar cells [6] to printable electronic circuits based on organic field-effect transistors (OFETs). [7] While OLED displays outperform their inorganic counterparts in terms of energy efficiency, [8] scientific and technical challenges concerning the stability and processability of the organic materials used in large-area OLEDs and organic solar cells remain. New challenges arise from applications, such as displays on flexible substrates, OLED lightning, large area displays as well as for printable or solution processable larger area solar cells. [8] Many of the remaining challenges are material related, e.g., the low mobility of charge carriers in organic materials in general and in amorphous organic semiconductors in particular. There are other materials related issues, such as limited OLED life times due to unstable blue hosts and emitters, [9] low fill factors, and therefore reduced power conversion efficiencies of organic solar cells, [10,11] low conductivity and high costs of organic charge transport layers of perovskite solar cells [6,12,13] and low conductivity and hard processability of crystalline OFET materials. [14] Conductivity and injection can be improved by doping the organic thin films with molecular dopants with high electron affinities (p-type) [15] or low ionization energies (n-type). [16] The doping mechanism of organic materials is in many cases not well understood, [17] making material and device optimization a costly experimental endeavor.The development of better materials is presently based on chemical insight, in part guided by theoretical understanding, or the experimental screening of large numbers of compounds. Given the size of the potentially available chemical space this remains a costly and time-consuming approach. Recent successes in experimental design of novel materials and concepts include the development of a stable strong molecular n-type dopant, [16] a study about the quantitative relation between interaction parameter, miscibility, and function of conjugated polymer donors and small-molecule acceptors for bulk heterojunctions as used in organic solar cells [18] the development of a universal strategy for ohmic hole injection into organic semiconductors with high ionization energies [19] and many others. [20][21][22][23][24][25] Another example is the development of strategies to harvest triplet excitons in organic light emitting diodes. For this purpose, novel classes of emitter molecules were developed, which include thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF)-based molecules, [26][27][28][29][30][31][32] rotationally accessed spin-state inversion, [33] and radical-based emitters. [34] Materials for organic electronics are presently used in prominent applications, such as displays in mobile devices, while being intensely researched for other purposes, such as organic photovoltaics, large-area devices, and thin-film transistors. Many of the challenges to improve and optimize these applications are material related and there is a nearly inf...