Six decades of chemiluminescence studies: A brief retrospective view to the very beginning and the subsequent developments

Abstract

The first symposium on bioluminescence and related topics was held at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD in 1961 [1], while the first symposium on all types of chemiluminescence took place in Durham, NC in 1965 [2]. Both events furnished the logical consequence of a substantial breakthrough in the scientific field referred to the chemical and biological excited-state generation. Indeed, the preceding years had been commemorated by the observations of a weak light emission accompanying diverse chemical reactions and biochemical processes [3-6], and it has become clear that the “chemical/biological light” constitutes a general and widespread phenomenon rather than rare and exotic happening. For the first (and the last!) time the papers on all types of chemiluminescence were included into the program of the Durham Symposium (1965), whose topics encompassed chemiluminescence in the gaseous phase (10 papers, in particular, by a future Nobel Prize Laureate J.C. Polanyi), experimental methods (first of all, the 68-pages long paper by J. Lee and H.H. Seliger on the measurements of absolute quantum yields of chemi- and bioluminescence is worth mentioning), chemiluminescence in solutions (17 papers), including outstanding pioneering work of R.F. Vasil’ev on oxy-chemiluminescence, bioluminescence (only 2 papers, however: the one, by J.W. Hastings, Q.H. Gibson and C. Greenwood, on the elucidation of molecular mechanisms of such a phenomenon, and the other one, by G. Cilento, on the generation and transfer of the electronic excitation in biochemical systems). Organization of such a meeting included sending the collection of papers (the Proceedings volume contained 435 pages) to each author by ordinary post (note that neither Internet nor E-mail were in use these years!) prior to the Symposium. Thus, at the sessions each paper was taken as read and the speakers had merely ten minutes to revise, augment and/or point out the highlights of their research. Discussion followed each paper, for which contributors had the upper limit of five minutes. This historical event has been crowned by publishing the Symposium materials encompassing 27 papers [2], the first “condensed” knowledge on the chemiluminescence phenomenon. The next most important milestone in summarizing the salient outcomes of chemi- and bioluminescence studies refers to the bestseller edited by W. Adam and G. Cilento [7], while elucidation of the dioxetane chemuluminescence mechanisms (which are of prime importance for modeling the pertinent bioluminescence processes) is comprehensively surveyed in [8].

References
1. W. McElroy, B. Glass (Eds), Light and Life, The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore 1961.
2. Symposium on Chemiluminescence: Durham, North Carolina. Preprint of Papers, 1965.
3. Yu.A. Vladimirov, F.F. Litvin, Studies of ultra weak luminescence in biological systems. Biofizika 1959, 4 (5), 601-605.
4. A.I. Zhuravlev, A.I. Polivoda, B.N. Tarusov, A weak luminescence from living tissues and organs. Radiobiologiya 1961, 1 (3), 321-323.
5. V.Ja. Shliapintokh, R.F. Vasil’ev, O.N. Karpukhine, L.M. Postnikov, L.A. Kibalko, J. Chim. Phys. 1960, 57, 1113-1122.
6. G. Ahnström, G. v. Ehrenstein. Luminescence of aqueous solutions of substances irradiated with ionizing radiation in the solid state. Acta Chem. Scand. 1959, 13 (4), 855-856.
7. W. Adam, G. Cilento, Eds. (1982), Chemical and Biological Generation of Excited States, Academic Press, New York, 1982.
8. W. Adam, A.V. Trofimov, Contemporary trends in dioxetane chemistry. In: The Chemistry of Peroxides (Ed. Z. Rappoport), V. 2, Part 2, Patai Series: The Chemistry of Functional Groups, 2006, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., Chichester, Chapter 15, 1171-1209.

Speaker

Aleksei V. Trofimov
Emanuel Institute of Biochemical Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow 119334, Russia
Russia

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