From light to life: How glowing dyes could transform energy and medicine
Arizona State University researcher Edwin Gonzalez and his team have created new glowing dyes that could power cleaner energy and advance medical treatments. Photos courtesy of the School of Molecular Sciences
Dyes don’t just color our clothes or the icing on our cakes — they play a big role in scientific research. They’re used in a range of scientific applications, from staining cells to view under a microscope to highlighting cancer cells for diagnosis and treatment.
Arizona State University researcher Edwin Gonzalez has invented a new, glowing dye that could illuminate new discoveries in solar power, health applications and more.
Gonzalez, a postdoctoral researcher with ASU’s School of Molecular Sciences, and a team of collaborators from the school and the Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto in Argentina recently published a paper on the topic in the American Chemical Society Publications' Organic Letters Journal.
The team described a new method for creating colorful dye molecules, which was achieved by combining two types of chemical building blocks, and triggering a reaction using a compound that contains boron and fluorine.
The research team’s new method makes it easier to create a variety of dyes that may look similar but have distinct properties — with the difference in even a single atom potentially changing a dye’s ability to fluoresce or transfer energy to oxygen.
They also found a way to change how these new dyes — called bopyrenpy — glow, and how they absorb and release light.
Bopyrenpy’s “flexibility is critical for designing next-generation functional dyes for imaging, optoelectronics and solar energy conversion,” Gonzalez said. He added that it “provides both a new molecular design strategy and a pathway toward societal benefit, from cleaner energy to improved human health.”
Gonzalez has always been fascinated by how light can affect chemical processes. Early in his career, he worked with porphyrins — ring-shaped molecules that help bind metals and play a key role in processes such as oxygen transport and photosynthesis — and related dyes. He was intrigued to see how changing a molecule’s design could control how it absorbs light, stores energy and how long it stays active after being excited.
He became interested in designing new chromophores (the parts of molecules that absorb light) and exploring how those molecules respond to absorbed energy, a process known as photophysical behavior. This research excited him because it advanced his dual goals of uncovering fundamental principles and enabling applications in areas such as artificial photosynthesis, energy conversion and biomedical science.
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Bopyrenpy shows how much untapped potential remains. By pairing these molecules with different partners or building them into new materials, Gonzalez said, researchers could create everything from light-activated antimicrobial coatings and smart windows to dye-sensitized solar cells and advanced medical diagnostics.
The special dyes could generate reactive oxygen species — a highly reactive form of oxygen that can destroy tumor cells in treatments like photodynamic therapy.
Bopyrenpy’s properties allow it to “combat drug-resistant microbes and cancer cells where conventional treatments are increasingly ineffective,” Gonzalez said.
He and his team partnered with ASU's Core Research Facilities’ Ultrafast Laser Facility to conduct experiments in developing their technique. Gonzalez said the facility’s time-correlated single-photon counting setup gave researchers a window into how small tweaks to bopyrenpy’s structure changed the way it interacts with light. Those insights are helping the team see which versions of the molecule could one day power new medical treatments or clean energy technologies.
Anton Khmelnitskiy, manager of the Ultrafast Laser Facility, said the system lets researchers measure how long molecules glow after being hit with light — down to trillionths of a second. This helps them differentiate molecules that shine with the same color but act differently once they absorb light.
He added that this reveals details they could not see by just looking at the brightness or color of the glow alone.
Khmelnitskiy said having facility staff available to run instruments and help interpret the data allows researchers to produce high-quality, publishable results without needing to develop all that expertise themselves. This support makes advanced science more accessible, speeds discoveries and encourages collaboration across fields.
Gonzalez said he believes researchers are only scratching the surface of what bopyrenpy can do.
“The opportunity to bridge fundamental photophysics with real-world applications is what makes this research especially exciting,” he said.
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