Li Chenghui, associate professor of Nanjing University, has synthesized a new azafused ring dye and named it "phthalein"

Among many planar nitrogenous organic dyes, phthalocyanine has attracted a lot of attention due to its excellent photophysical properties and stability By changing the core structure of phthalocyanine, more new properties can be obtained while retaining some advantages of phthalocyanine As the most common precursor of phthalocyanine, phthalonitrile is often used to prepare nuclear modified phthalocyanine derivatives, such as phthalocyanine, superphthaline, macrocyclic compounds replacing isoindole units, etc However, there are some problems in the preparation of core modified phthalocyanine derivatives, such as low yield, difficult separation and non planar structure Therefore, it is still a challenge to obtain novel planar π conjugated molecules by using phthalonitrile as the precursor and using efficient and convenient preparation methods In the preliminary work, the research team of Li Chenghui, associate professor of Nanjing University, developed a method for the efficient preparation of asymmetric benzoaza BODIPY from phthalonitrile (angelw Chem Int ed 2015, 54, 9070-9074) Recently, the research team used o-phthalonitrile as the precursor to prepare a new kind of AZA fused ring dye through an intermediate product containing a "half phthalocyanine" structure The absorption spectrum of the dye is similar to that of phthalocyanine, and it has two absorption peaks with high resolution According to the naming rules of phthalocyanine, this kind of material is named "phthalorubine" The results of experiments and theoretical calculations show that phthalein is a new kind of aromatic condensed ring system, and has special coordination properties, which has potential applications in coordination chemistry, photoelectric materials and other fields This achievement "phthalorubines (PRS): a new class of fused ring compoundssynthesized from phthalonitrile" was published online on angew Chem Int ed (DOI: 10.1002/anie.201807281) The first author of the paper is Zheng Wei, associate researcher, and the corresponding author is Li Chenghui, associate professor Dr Zhao Yuan, from the Key Laboratory of natural medicine and immune engineering, Henan University, is the co-author of the paper, who is responsible for the theoretical calculation In addition, Dr Wu Jingjing from the school of chemistry and chemical engineering of Xiamen University also participated in part of the work The above work was supported by NSFC, Jiangsu provincial fund for Distinguished Young Scholars and other projects, as well as the National Key Laboratory of coordination chemistry and the collaborative innovation center of artificial microstructure.