Optical, Redox, and NLO Properties of Tricyanovinyl Oligothiophenes: Comparisons between Symmetric and Asymmetric Substitution Patterns

13 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables.A series of tricyanovinyl (TCV)-substituted oligothiophenes was synthesized and investigated with a number of physical methods including UV/Vis, IR, and Raman spectroscopy, nonlinear optical (NLO) measurements, X-ray diffraction, and cyclic voltammetry. Mono- or disubstituted oligomers were prepared by the reaction of tetracyanoethylene with mono- or dilithiated oligomers. The comparative effects of the symmetric and asymmetric substitutions in the electronic and molecular properties have been addressed. These oligomers display dramatic reductions in both their optical and electrochemical band gaps in comparison with unsubstituted molecules. The analysis of the electronic properties of the molecules was assisted by density functional theory calculations, which are in excellent agreement with the experimental data. TCV substitution influences the energies of the frontier orbitals, especially with respect to the stabilization of LUMO orbitals. X-ray structural characterization of a monosubstituted oligomer exhibits -stacking with favorable intermolecular interactions. NLO results agree with the role of the intramolecular charge-transfer feature in the asymmetric samples. These results furthermore exalt the role of conformational flexibility in the disubstituted compounds and reveal an unexpected nonlinear optical activity for symmetric molecules. Regarding the electronic structure, the interpretation of the vibrational data reflects the balanced interplay between aromatic and quinoid forms, finely tuned by the chain length and substitution pattern. The electronic and structural properties are consistent with the semiconducting properties exhibited by these materials in thin film transistors (TFTs).J.C. is grateful to the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (MCyT) of Spain for a Ramón y Cajal research position of Chemistry at the University of Málaga. The present work was supported in part by the Dirección General de Enseñanza Superior (DGES, MEC, Spain) through the research projects BQU2003–03194 and BQU2002-00219. We are also indebted to Junta de Andalucía (Spain) (FQM-0159) and Gobierno de Aragón (E39) funding for our research groups. M.C.R.D. thanks the MEC of Spain for a personal grant. T.M.P. acknowledges a Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry and Scholarship from the Office of the Dean of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota.Peer reviewe

Genomic profile of copy number variants on the short arm of human chromosome 8

We evaluated 966 consecutive pediatric patients with various developmental disorders by high-resolution microarray-based comparative genomic hybridization and found 10 individuals with pathogenic copy number variants (CNVs) on the short arm of chromosome 8 (8p), representing approximately 1% of the patients analyzed. Two patients with 8p terminal deletion associated with interstitial inverted duplication (inv dup del(8p)) had different mechanisms leading to the formation of a dicentric intermediate during meiosis. Three probands carried an identical ∼5.0 Mb interstitial duplication of chromosome 8p23.1. Four possible hotspots within 8p were observed at nucleotide coordinates of ∼10.45, 24.32–24.82, 32.19–32.77, and 38.94–39.72 Mb involving the formation of recurrent genomic rearrangements. Other CNVs with deletion- or duplication-specific start or stop coordinates on the 8p provide useful information for exploring the basic mechanisms of complex structural rearrangements in the human genome