Synthesis, properties and biological imaging of hemicurcuminoid are presented.

High-surface-area carbon-based capacitors exhibit significant advantages relative to conventional graphite-based systems, such as high power density, low weight, and mechanical flexibility. In this work, novel porous carbon-based electrodes were obtained from commercial cotton fibers (CFs) impregnated with graphene oxide (GO) at different dipping times. A subsequent thermal treatment under inert atmosphere conditions enables the synthesis of electrodes based on reduced GO (RGO) supported on carbon fibers. Those synthetized with 15 min and 30 min of dipping time displayed high specific capacitance given their optimal micro-/ mesoporosity ratio. Particularly, the RGO/CCF_15A supercapacitor reports a remarkable specific capacitance of 74.1 F g⁻¹ at 0.2 A g⁻¹ and a high cycling stability with a 97.7% capacitive retention, making this electrode a promising candidate for supercapacitor design. Finally, we conducted a density functional theory study to obtain deeper information about the driving forces leading to the GO/CF structures.

Molecules displaying a π-conjugated D–A–D structure, in which D and A are electron donor and acceptor groups, respectively, represent an important class of dyes. In this work, we present a series of borondifluoride complexes of curcuminoid derivatives in which the central dioxaborine ring acts as a strong electron acceptor unit. Compounds 1–15 differ by the nature of the terminal D groups. We have also studied unsymmetrical compounds 16–23 that contain two different terminal donor groups, as well as compounds 24–32 in which an electron acceptor or donor unit has been introduced at the meso position of the dioxaborine ring. We describe the synthesis of the dyes that have not yet been reported in the literature, and report the electrochemical, absorption and fluorescence properties of all the compounds in dichloromethane. To gain insights into the electronic structures and optical properties, we performed DFT/TD-DFT calculations for a panel of representative compounds. We established correlations between the reduction potential and the Hammett σ and σ⁺ constants, as well as between the redox gap and the emission wavelength. The electron donor character of one terminal D unit strongly influences (88 mV per unit of σ) the reduction potential due to the strong resonance interaction along the curcuminoid backbone. The correlation points to the smaller effect of the meso substituent (50 mV per unit of σ), which we relate to the twisted ground-state geometry of the meso aryl substituent. The correlation models established in this study may be useful to anticipate the optical and electrochemical properties of borondifluoride complexes of curcuminoids with good reliability.