A novel phosphorescent iridium(iii) complex bearing a donor-acceptor-type o-carboranylated ligand for endocellular hypoxia imaging.

The structure-property relationship of carborane-embedded cationic iridium(iii) complexes was investigated in this work, especially with donor-acceptor-type ligands. Firstly, an efficient synthetic approach for the new donor-acceptor-type ligands (2 and 4) was developed. By using these ligands, novel iridium(iii) complexes II and IV were prepared. Complex IV shows about a 92 nm red-shift in solution (ΦP = 0.13 in ethanol), and the emission color has an obvious change from green to red when compared with the Model complex. In addition, the photophysical characteristics of complex IV are quite sensitive to the oxygen level in living cells, based on which endocellular hypoxia imaging of complex IV has been realized by the phosphorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (PLIM) technology. Besides the experimental studies, density functional theory (DFT) and time dependent DFT (TD-DFT) calculations have been successfully applied to investigate the excited-state electronic structures of carborane-modified iridium complexes.