Potential applications for the use of lanthanide complexes as luminescent biolabels

Abstract

Whilst there have been a number of excellent reviews on the design, synthesis, structural determination, and photophysics of luminescent lanthanide complexes (1-6), detailed information for coordination chemists on how these compounds may be used as analytes in the biochemical and biological sciences has been somewhat less readily accessible (4-8). The aim of this review is to provide an overview of the "complete story", from ligand design and synthesis through photophysical characterization to how such complexes could ultimately be used in a variety of analytical techniques.