Weaving and Carrying:The Versatility of Tailored Transition-Metal Based Polypyridyl Complexes

The first chapter deals with the ambitious goal of mimicking two-dimensional textiles
on a molecular level. A novel strategy for the preparation of single- layered interwoven
materials based on tailor-made amphiphilic heteroleptic terpyridine complexes will be
presented. This study necessitated to synthesize kinetically stable heteroleptic
complexes, determine the most suitable method for their polymerization, asses their
amphiphilic behavior on an air/water interface and to deposit of the self-assembled
woven materials onto substrates suitable for solid-state characterization. Additionally,
preliminary imaging attempts via atomic force microscopy will be presented and
discussed. This work represents a new approach for the interfacial bottom-up
preparation of two-dimensional molecular textiles, reporting about our achievements
in this ambitious topic.
The second chapter describes the molecular structure and the synthesis of a new class
of photolabile Ru(II)-based polypyridyl complexes, which are designed to respond to
a laser irradiation in high vacuum. The overall goal of this project was to prepare
photocleavable tags that act as charge carriers for polypeptides or proteins and
improve their potential detection in mass analyses. These would allow to specifically
control the molecules charge state and their spatio-temporal location thanks to the
photo-induced dissociation process. In collaboration with the research group of
Professor Markus Arndt from the University of Vienna, preliminary cleavage
experiments could already be performed in a modified mass spectrometer.