Tetrazole-Based Ruthenium Complexes as Promising Systems for Sensors

The design and syntheses of new transition metal complexes are still of particular interest both for the investigation of intramolecular electron transfer processes, under carefully controlled geometry, and for the potential applications of such systems in the rapidly expanding field of new materials for molecular electronics and electrochemical and luminescent sensors. Ruthenium complexes with heterocycles ligands have proved to be of interest for applications as sensing materials for substrates ranging from molecular and ionic species to DNA, to probe both structural and functional aspects of nucleic acid chemistry.[1,2]In this respect, the electronic properties of the metal complex must be properly tuned in order to obtain a positive interaction between the probe and substrate for getting an efficient trasducing signal. In this communication we report the electrochemical, UV-Vis-NIR spectroelectrochemical and electrochemiluminescence behaviour of a class of new polypyridyl ruthenium species containing tetrazole-based ligands which appear to be very promising for the development of electrochemical sensors and biosensors. [1] T. G. Drummond, M. G. Hill, J. K. Barton, Nature Biotech., 21, 2003, 1192. [2] K. E. Erkkila, D. T. Odom, J. K. Barton, Chem. Rev., 99, 1999, 2777.