Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Data-driven discovery of molecular photoswitche...

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

Data-driven discovery of molecular photoswitches with multioutput Gaussian processes

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
  • Ryan-Rhys Griffiths
  • Jake L Greenfield
  • Aditya R Thawani
  • Arian R Jamasb
  • Henry B Moss
  • Anthony Bourached
  • Penelope Jones
  • William McCorkindale
  • Alexander A Aldrick
  • Matthew J Fuchter
Close
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>7/12/2022
<mark>Journal</mark>Chemical Science
Issue number45
Volume13
Number of pages11
Pages (from-to)13541-13551
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date10/11/22
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Photoswitchable molecules display two or more isomeric forms that may be accessed using light. Separating the electronic absorption bands of these isomers is key to selectively addressing a specific isomer and achieving high photostationary states whilst overall red-shifting the absorption bands serves to limit material damage due to UV-exposure and increases penetration depth in photopharmacological applications. Engineering these properties into a system through synthetic design however, remains a challenge. Here, we present a data-driven discovery pipeline for molecular photoswitches underpinned by dataset curation and multitask learning with Gaussian processes. In the prediction of electronic transition wavelengths, we demonstrate that a multioutput Gaussian process (MOGP) trained using labels from four photoswitch transition wavelengths yields the strongest predictive performance relative to single-task models as well as operationally outperforming time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) in terms of the wall-clock time for prediction. We validate our proposed approach experimentally by screening a library of commercially available photoswitchable molecules. Through this screen, we identified several motifs that displayed separated electronic absorption bands of their isomers, exhibited red-shifted absorptions, and are suited for information transfer and photopharmacological applications. Our curated dataset, code, as well as all models are made available at https://github.com/Ryan-Rhys/The-Photoswitch-Dataset.