DNA Inspirited Rational Construction of Nonconventional Luminophores with Efficient and Color-Tunable Afterglow

<div>Persistent room-temperature phosphorescence (p-RTP) from pure organics is attractive </div><div>due to its fundamental importance and potential applications in molecular imaging, </div><div>sensing, encryption, anticounterfeiting, etc.1-4 Recently, efforts have been also made in </div><div>obtaining color-tunable p-RTP in aromatic phosphors5 and nonconjugated polymers6,7. </div><div>The origin of color-tunable p-RTP and the rational design of such luminogens, </div><div>particularly those with explicit structure and molecular packing, remain challenging. </div><div>Noteworthily, nonconventional luminophores without significant conjugations generally </div><div>possess excitation-dependent photoluminescence (PL) because of the coexistence of </div><div>diverse clustered chromophores6,8, which strongly implicates the possibility to achieve </div><div>color-tunable p-RTP from their molecular crystals assisted by effective intermolecular </div><div>interactions. Here, inspirited by the highly stable double-helix structure and multiple </div><div>hydrogen bonds in DNA, we reported a series of nonconventional luminophores based on </div><div>hydantoin (HA), which demonstrate excitation-dependent PL and color-tunable p-RTP </div><div>from sky-blue to yellowish-green, accompanying unprecedentedly high PL and p-RTP </div><div>efficiencies of up to 87.5% and 21.8%, respectively. Meanwhile, the p-RTP emissions are </div><div>resistant to vigorous mechanical grinding, with lifetimes of up to 1.74 s. Such robust, </div><div>color-tunable and highly efficient p-RTP render the luminophores promising for varying </div><div>applications. These findings provide mechanism insights into the origin of color-tunable </div><div>p-RTP, and surely advance the exploitation of efficient nonconventional luminophores.</div>