Luminescent dendrimers as ligands for metal ions

Suitably designed luminescent dendrimers can play a role of ligands for luminescent and non-luminescent metal ions. This combination leads to species capable of exhibiting interesting and unusual properties, including (i) shielding excited states from quenching processes, (ii) light harvesting, (iii) conversion of incident UV light into visible or infrared emission, and (iv) metal ions sensing with signal amplification.