We present recent work on the study and application of environmentally sensitive excited states. Our central hypothesis is that environmentally sensitive deactivation of the molecular excited state can be used to selectively turn a photo-deprotection reaction ON and OFF. Because photochemistry is a zero-sum competition of the rates of different excited state processes, the manipulation of those rates by the environment selects which pathway is dominant. We discuss applications in material synthesis, biomedical diagnostics and peptide chemistry.













Brett VanVeller (Iowa State University)