Title
Efficient Discovery of Visible Light-Activated Azoarene Photoswitches with Long Half-Lives Using Active Search
Abstract
Photoswitches are molecules that undergo a reversible, structural isomerization after exposure to certain wavelengths of light. The dynamic control offered by molecular photoswitches is favorable for materials chemistry, photopharmacology, and catalysis applications. Ideal photoswitches absorb visible light and have long-lived metastable isomers. We used high-throughput virtual screening to predict the absorption maxima (lambda(max)) of the E-isomer and half-life (t(1/2)) of the Z-isomer. However, computing the photophysical and kinetic stabilities with density functional theory of each entry of a virtual molecular library containing thousands or millions of molecules is prohibitively time-consuming. We applied active search, a machine-learning technique, to intelligently search a chemical search space of 255 991 photoswitches based on 29 known azoarenes and their derivatives. We iteratively trained the active search algorithm on whether a candidate absorbed visible light (lambda(max) > 450 nm). Active search was found to triple the discovery rate compared to random search. Further, we projected 1962 photoswitches to 2D using the Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection algorithm and found that lambda(max) depends on the core, which is tunable by substituents. We then incorporated a second stage of screening to predict the stabilities of the Z-isomers for the top candidates of each core. We identified four ideal photoswitches that concurrently satisfy the following criteria: lambda(max) > 450 nm and t(1/2) > 2 h.These candidates had lambda(max) and t(1/2) range from 465 to 531 nm and hours to days, respectively.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1021/acs.jcim.1c00954
JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL INFORMATION AND MODELING
DocType
Volume
Issue
Journal
61
11
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1549-9596
0
0.34
References 
Authors
5
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fatemah Mukadum100.34
Quan Nguyen200.34
Daniel M Adrion300.34
Gabriel Appleby401.35
Rui Chen500.68
Haley Dang600.34
Remco Chang798364.96
Roman Garnett845432.71
Steven A Lopez900.34