Detergent-induced self-assembly and controllable photosensitizer activity of diester phenylene ethynylenes

Significance Photosensitizers harvest light energy and transfer it to ground-state molecular oxygen, producing singlet oxygen, a powerful oxidizer. This property can be exploited for targeted removal of diseased or cancerous tissue, but most currently available photosensitizers do not display any molecular specificity. We discovered that diester phenylene ethynylenes exhibit switchable photosensitizer activity based on their immediate molecular environment, and used detergent-induced self-assembly to demonstrate that these molecules present an attractively compact switchable photosensitizer system.