Internal Dynamics of Dendritic Molecules Probed by Pyrene Excimer Formation

This review exposes the current poor understanding of the internal segmental chain dynamics of dendrimers in solution probed by monitoring the process of excimer formation between pyrene labels covalently attached to the chain ends of dendrimers. The review begins by covering the bases of fluorescence and the kinetics of pyrene excimer formation before describing a procedure based on the Model Free (MF) analysis that is used to analyze quantitatively the fluorescence decays acquired for dendrimers, the ends of which have been fully and covalently labeled with pyrene. Comparison of the various trends obtained by different research groups describing the efficiency of pyrene excimer formation with the generation number of dendrimers illustrates the lack of consensus between the few studies devoted to the topic. One possible reason for this disagreement might reside in the presence of minute amounts of unattached pyrene labels which act as potent fluorescent impurities and affect the analysis of the fluorescence spectra and decays in an uncontrolled manner. The review points out that the MF analysis of the fluorescence decays acquired with pyrene-labeled dendrimers enables one to account for the presence of unattached pyrene and to retrieve information about the internal segmental dynamics of the dendrimer. It provides guidelines that should enable future studies on pyrene-labeled dendrimers to yield results that are more straightforward to interpret.