A Roadmap to Success in Photopharmacology

ConspectusLight is a fascinating phenomenon that ties together physics, chemistry, and biology. It is unmatched in its ability to confer information with temporal and spatial precision and has been used to map objects on the scale of tens of nanometers (10–8 m) to light years (1016 m). This information, gathered through super-resolution microscopes or space-based telescopes, is ultimately funneled through the human visual system, which is a miracle in itself. It allows us to see the Andromeda galaxy at night, an object that is 2.5 million light years away and very dim, and ski the next day in bright sunlight at an intensity that is 12 orders of magnitude higher.Human vision is only one of many photoreceptive systems that have evolved on earth and are found in all kingdoms of life. These systems rely on molecular photoswitches, such as retinal or tetrapyrrols, which undergo transient bond isomerizations or bond formations upon irradiation. The set of chromophores that have been employed in Nature for this ...