Metallosupramolecular Dye Assemblies

Metallosupramolecular assemblies of dyes are of increasing interest as model systems for natural light harvesting and photosynthetic complexes as well as for potential applications in solar energy conversion, photonics and molecular electronics. Considerable efforts have been made in the past years to design novel metallosupramolecular dye architectures for such applications. Often in combination with other noncovalent interactions like hydrogen-bonding and π--π-stacking, metal-ion coordination has been utilized to achieve self-organization of dye building blocks into elaborate architectures with interesting optical and photophysical properties. Diverse metallosupramolecular dye assemblies -- macrocycles, polyhedra, polymers and dendrimers -- have been constructed in recent years by the metal-coordination approach. Here we review the recent advances in metallosupramolecular dye assemblies with particular attention to their thermodynamic stability and photophysical functionality. Emphasis is given to metal-ion mediated self-organization of porphyrin, metalloporphyrin and perylene bisimide dyes.