Discotic (disk-shaped) molecules or molecular aggregates may form, within a certain temperature range, partially ordered phases, known as discotic liquid crystals, which have been extensively studied in the recent past. On the one hand, this interest was prompted by the fact that they represent models for testing energy and charge transport theories in organic materials. However, their long-range self-assembling properties, potential low cost, ease of processability with a variety of solvents and the relative ease of tailoring their properties via chemical synthesis, drove the attention of researchers also towards the exploitation of their semiconducting properties in organic electronic devices. This review covers recent research on the charge transport properties of discotic mesophases, starting with an introduction to their phase structure, followed by an overview of the models used to describe charge mobility in organic substances in general and in these systems in particular, and by the description of the techniques most commonly used to measure their charge mobility. The reader already familiar or not interested in such details can easily skip these sections and refer to the core section of this work, focusing on the most recent and significant results regarding charge mobility in discotic liquid crystals.

A luminescent Ir( iii ) complex has been embedded into Au@SiO ₂ nanoparticles for simultaneous imaging and phototherapeutic human cancer cell treatment.

We report a new family of liquid crystalline porphyrin-core dendrimers with coumarin units at the periphery of the dendrimer. These compounds have been prepared by copper-catalyzed azide–alkyne “click” cycloaddition (CuAAC). The mesomorphic properties have been investigated via polarized optical microscopy (POM), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The peripheral coumarin units play a key role in the liquid crystal behavior, contributing to the appearance of discotic nematic mesophases with hole mobility values among the highest values reported for discotic liquid crystals (of the order of 1 cm² V⁻¹ s⁻¹). It has also been demonstrated that excitation of the coumarin moieties leads to energy transfer (antenna effect) to the luminescent porphyrin core. Therefore, this strategy, which involves ‘click’ chemistry, has been proven to be a powerful and elegant synthetic tool for the preparation of optoelectronic materials based on complex dendritic architectures.