Metals ferrocene oligomer derivatives

Redox molecules are particularly interesting for an electrochemical approach, because they offer addressable (functional) energy states in an electrochemically accessible potential window, which can be tuned upon polarization between oxidized and reduced states. The difference in the junction conductance of the oxidized and the reduced forms of redox molecules may span several orders of magnitude. Examples of functional molecules used in these studies include porphyrins [31,153], viologens [33, 34,110,114,154,155], aniline and thiophene oligomers [113, 146, 156, 157], metal-organic terpyridine complexes [46, 158-163], carotenes [164], nitro derivatives of OPE (OPV) [165, 166], ferrocene [150, 167, 168], perylene tetracarboxylic bisimide [141, 169, 170], tetrathia-fulvalenes [155], fullerene derivatives [171], redox-active proteins [109, 172-174], and hydroxyquinones [175]. 

In most of the work on oligo-deoxynucleotides (ODNs) to date, very similar chemistry has been used for covalent binding of organometallics to the ODNs (Schiff base, activated acids, metal-catalyzed couplings). Anne< /tf/. reported an interesting enzymatic reaction to extend the 3 terminus of an ODN. They use a ferrocenylated di-deoxynu-cleotide uridine triphosphate (Fc-ddUTP) as the substrate, which is accepted as an enzyme substrate and terminates the oligomer. Other Fc-dUTP derivatives were also tested as substrates for common DNA polymerases. This approach was later extended to ferrocene-labeled RNA, and electrochemical RNA detection on Au-DNA electrodes could be achieved. ... 

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