Lars Muller
Dendritic Tryptophan

Project Overview

Lars (Erasmus Student – Aachen) was the first ever student in the Smith group. He developed dendritically functionalised tryptophan derivatives as a unique biological mimic. The dendritic branching controlled the fluorescence of the tryptophan by placing it in a unique microenvironment. Tryptophan fluorescence is of great importance in molecular biology because it is used as a diagnostic marker of the environment of the tryptophan group, and hence our system nicely mimicked biological systems. This biomimetic research was published in Chem. Commun. and later provided the foundation for Stepahnie Koenig’s project, which led to another paper for Lars in Chem. Eur. J.