Porphyrin supramolecules by complementary coordination for units constructing photosynthetic systems

Among unique structural arrangements provided by nature, special pair and macroring antenna complexes in bacterial photosynthetic systems have been mimicked by simple organization of choromophores. The special pair was mimicked by imidazolyl-substituted porphyrinatozinc which gave a complementary coordination dimer of slipped cofacial orientation with an extremely large stability constant of 1010 M-1 in CHCl 3. When two imidazolylporphyrinatozinc units were linked directly at the meso positions, linear and continuous growth of the complementary coordination lead to porphyrin arrays of a few hundreds nanometer scale, corresponding to molecular weights of a few 105. At the same time, the porphyrin array could be dissociated into the monomeric unit by competitive coordination of solvents. This provided a way of terminating or initiating the oligomeric porphyrin array with appropriate chain terminals/initiators. Two imidazolylporphyrinatozinc complexes were then linked by a m-phenylene unit with an angle of 120°. The linear and macrocyclic oligomer mixtures initially obtained were converged smoothly by reorganization equilibrium into a mixture of hexameric and pentameric macrocycles under high-dilution conditions. The ring mimicked the structure and function of the light harvesting complexes of bacterial photosynthetic systems. The covalent linking of coordination organized porphyrins was also developed to maintain the structure even in highly coordinating solvents such as pyridine. The linear array formation and the facile introduction of specific terminal/initiator groups by complementary coordination were then applied to introduce antenna function onto solar cell. Through thiolate attachment on a gold surface, imidazolylporphyrinatozinc initiated the growth of meso-meso linked porphyrin arrays by successive complementary coordination. This methodology improved the efficiency of absorption of incident photon and increased significantly the total photocurrent generation efficiency.