Tuesday, February 1, 2011

There's Nothing Wrong With People Wanting to Experiment

Let's start with a fluorescent hydrazine derivative, which looks like this:
This fluorescent dye has had the hydrazine group added so that it will be reactive to ketones and aldehydes. When the fluorescent dye is exposed to an aldehyde or ketone, it undergoes a dehydration reaction, something along the lines of this:

Now, the reactive dye has specific optical properties. These properties include quantum yield, which is basically the amount of fluorescent emission produced per input light. This means that a certain concentration of dye will produce a predictable fluorescence intensity when excited with a known intensity of illumination light. Other optical properties of interest are the excitation and emission wavelengths. These are the wavelengths of light at which absorption by the dye is maximum and the fluorescent emission of the dye is maximum, respectively.

So here's what I'm wondering. If you react the fluorescent hydrazine with a ketone or aldehyde, do any of these properties change? When the two molecules are combined, does the quantum yield change, making the fluorescent emission more or less bright than it was initially? Will the emission wavelength change, causing a shift in the color of the fluorescence output?

I think both of these possibilities are quite likely, particularly the emission wavelength shift. The reason I believe this is likely is that the makeup of the fluorescent molecule has changed when it combines with the ketone or aldehyde, essentially creating a new molecule. So why wouldn't the optical properties be altered in some way? I've been scouring the internet to answer this question, but have found no definitive answers thus far. So I guess there's only one way to find out. Conduct the experiment myself. And that's what I think I'll do.

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