Abstract
The circumstances in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which led to a) the generalization of luminescent PET (photoinduced electron transfer) sensing/switching as a design tool, b) the construction of a market-leading blood electrolyte analyzer and c) the invention of molecular logic-based computation as an experimental field, are delineated. Efforts to extend the philosophy of these approaches into issues of small object identification, nanometric mapping, animal visual perception and visual art are also outlined.
Highlights
Sri Lanka: A civil war leads to 100,000 needless deaths
One of the most influential concepts that emerged from this ferment was photoinduced electron transfer (PET) [6,7], especially following the previous realization of its central role in green plant photosynthesis
Since PET and luminescence compete for the deactivation of the same excited state, it was clear that a luminescence signal could be switched ‘on’ by chemical command
Summary
At the time that I was studying for a Ph.D. in organic photochemistry [5], the field was in transition. The receptor could be an amine [3,24,30], an amino acid [18,31], a crown ether [32] or a cryptand [33] and the spacer could be an oligomethylene chain [34] or nothing at all [35,36] Since such diverse systems allow the addressing of various problems and since the design is usually straightforward, the PET sensor/switch design tool has been taken up by about 330 laboratories (Figure 1, PET maps) so far. Since membrane-bounded H+ forms the heart of the field of bioenergetics [50], these concentrations need to be located as a function of position with respect to the membrane Such maps can be constructed by using fluorescent PET sensors equipped with extra modules for fine positioning and for reading the position, e.g., 2 [51]. We see that even sub-nanometric spaces can be accessed by fluorescent PET-based molecules in order to shed light on these tiny worlds
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