BODIPY on Board of Sugars: A Short Enlightened Journey up to the Cells

BODIPY dyes have unique properties including: good stability in many solvents, high extinction coefficients, stability to light, sharp fluorescence emissions in the visible region with high fluorescence quantum yields. Moreover, through small chemical modifications of the skeleton, their luminescence properties can be finely tuned. As a consequence, during the last decades, this family of chromophores found extensive application in a wide range of fields. Carbohydrates play a relevant role in living organisms: their tasks range from energy storage to structural constituents of cells and tissues, they are involved in a variety of molecular recognition phenomena of physiological and biological relevance. The cyclic structure of natural D-monosaccharides, also offers the conditions to use carbohydrates as building-blocks in the construction of more complex, supramolecular structures. With these assumptions, in the last years our research in this field has focused on the study of synthesis, the photophysical features, and the application in the biomedical field of molecules that bear the synergic presence of these two tools. Pointing on the rationalization of this research, this article will provide a synthetic review of our last-year's results in the field of BODIPY/glycosyl species, that can be classified in two principal sections: a) the rational synthesis and the photophysical studies of BODIPY dyads and antennas containing different kind of sugar units as scaffolds, ranging from mono- to disaccharide patterns, and b) the synthetic functionalization and modification of suitable BODIPY structures, for their punctual application in the field of bio-imaging.