Disinfection of nosocomial pathogens in hospitals is crucial to combat healthcare-acquired infections, which can be acquired by patients, visitors and healthcare workers. However, the presence of a wide range of pathogens and biofilms, combined with the indiscriminate use of antibiotics, presents infection control teams in healthcare facilities with ongoing challenges in the selection of biocides and application methods. This necessitates the development of biocides and innovative disinfection methods that overcome the shortcomings of conventional methods. This comprehensive review finds the use of hydrogen peroxide vapour to be a superior alternative to conventional methods. Motivated by observations in previous studies, herein, we provide a comprehensive overview on the utilisation of hydrogen peroxide vapour as a superior high-level disinfection alternative in hospital settings. This review finds hydrogen peroxide vapour to be very close to an ideal disinfectant due to its proven efficacy against a wide range of microorganisms, safety to use, lack of toxicity concerns and good material compatibility. The superiority of hydrogen peroxide vapour was recently demonstrated in the case of decontamination of N95/FFP2 masks for reuse to address the critical shortage caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the significant number of studies demonstrating antimicrobial activity, there remains a need to critically understand the mechanism of action by performing studies that simultaneously measure damage to all bacterial cell components and assess the correlation of this damage with a reduction in viable cell count. This can lead to improvement in antimicrobial efficacy and foster the development of superior approaches.

The last decade has seen an increasingly large number of studies reporting on the development of novel small organic conjugated systems for mitochondrial imaging exploiting optical signal transduction pathways. Mitochondria are known to play a critical role in a number of key biological processes, including cellular metabolism. Importantly, irregularities on their working function are nowadays understood to be intimately linked to a range of clinical conditions, highlighting the importance of targeting mitochondria for therapeutic benefits. In this work we carry out an in‐depth evaluation on the progress to date in the field to pave the way for the realization of superior alternatives to those currently existing. The manuscript is structured by commonly used chemical scaffolds and comprehensively covers key aspects factored in design strategies such as synthetic approaches as well as photophysical and biological characterization, to foster collaborative work among organic and physical chemists as well as cell biologists.

Effective strategies for the detection and identification of explosives are highly desirable. Herein, we illustrate the efficient optoelectronic detection of nitroaromatic and peroxide-based explosives using amine- and phosphine-substituted diketopyrrolopyrroles. Selective quenching and an unprecedented enhancement of thin-film emission in the presence of nitroaromatic vapors are demonstrated via the judicious choice of amine substituents. The modulation of fluorescence emission in each case is shown to be dominated by electronic and thermodynamic effects, the vapor pressure of explosives, and the thin-film morphology. For peroxide detection, we describe an approach exploiting redox-mediated functional group transformation. The rapid oxidation of triphenylphosphine to phosphine oxide with hydrogen peroxide affords a significant increase in fluorescence emission, facilitating the sensitive turn-on detection of an important class of explosives at ppb concentrations.

Rationalizing the effects of molecular substitution in π-conjugated organic materials arising from well-defined intermolecular interactions, which can influence the formation of predefined packing motifs and control the emergence of π–π stacking represents a current challenge in supramolecular design. Significant effort is potentially required to manage the impact on solid state packing behavior in materials that have been molecularly tuned to carry out specific photophysical and electrochemical functions. In this regard, fluorine substitution in π-conjugated systems has seen a recent surge of interest, primarily aimed toward the development of materials with enhanced optical and optoelectronic behavior. In light of this interest, in the following study, we report the synthesis and single crystal structures from a series of four novel and structurally related, symmetric, fluorinated N-benzyl substituted diketopyrrolopyrroles (DPPs). Two of the investigated series exhibit slipped cofacial π–π dimer pairs, which are consistent with those reported by us previously in halogenated DPPs. Significantly, this characteristic stacking motif of N-benzyl substituted DPPs can be carefully modified via the replacement of hydrogen atoms with trifluoromethyl and isosteric fluorine–hydrogen substituents. In the case of trifluoromethyl substitution, we identify a previously unobserved packing motif exhibiting a framework of well-defined channels propagating along the length of the crystallographic c-axis. In each of the reported systems, all of the nearest neighbor dimer pairs have been identified and their intermolecular interaction energies computed by means of the M06-2X density functional at the 6-311G(d) level. Through a detailed theoretical analysis involving the determination of cropped dimer energetics, organic fluorine is shown to play an active role in the stabilization of the crystal extracted dimer pairs through a number of additive and weak C–F---H, C–F---π_F, and C–F---π intermolecular contacts. Contrary to recent reports, we demonstrate that substitution of hydrogen by fluorine can also lead to dramatic changes in solid state packing behavior as a consequence of these weak interactions. Given the importance of organic fluorine substitution in the construction of π-conjugated materials for optoelectronic materials, we feel that this work should be of interest to the wider community involved in supramolecular design of organic conjugated systems, and in particular to those investigating organic fluorine as well as diketopyrrolopyrrole containing architectures.