Continuous intra- and intermolecular energy transfer in light-harvesting gels from natural amino acids-based dendrons

The gels and co-gels from glycine (Gly) and glutamic acid (Glu)-based dendrons with either tyrosine (Tyr) or tryptophan (Trp), two of the luminescent amino acid residues in natural proteins, at the focal point were reported. Such gels showed efficient light-harvesting and energy transfer properties. Specially, a high efficient energy transfer (ET) process and a light-harvesting in the co-gel system were achieved. Moreover, luminescent gels with tunable emission ranging from blue to green were also observed owing to the cascade intra- and intermolecular ET from dendritic gelators to the guest molecules (PDNS) in the host-guest gel system (co-gel with PDNS as the guest molecule), which mimicked the natural light-harvesting systems.