Facets of Click-Mediated Triazoles in Decorating Aminoacids and Peptides

Decorating biomolecular building blocks, such as amino acids, to afford desired and tuneable photophysical/biophysical properties would allow chemical biologists to use them for several biotechnological and biosensing applications. While many synthetic methodologies have been explored in this direction, advantages provided by click-derived triazole moieties are second to none. However, since their discovery, click-mediated triazoles have been majorly utilised as linkers for conjugating biomolecules, creating materials with novel properties, such as polymers or drug conjugates. Despite exploring their profound role as linkers, click-mediated triazoles as an integral part of biomolecular building blocks have not been addressed. 1,2,3-Triazole, a transamide mimic, exhibits high aromatic stacking propensity, high associability with biomolecules through H-bonding, and high stability against enzymatic hydrolysis. Furthermore, triazoles can be considered donors useable for installation/modulation of the photophysics of a fluorophore. Therefore, triazole with a chromophoric unit may rightly be utilised as an integral part of biomolecular building blocks to install microenvironment-sensitive solvofluorochromic properties suitable for biological sensing, studying inter-biomolecular interactions and introducing novel physicochemical properties in a biomolecule. This review mainly focuses on the facets of click-derived triazole in designing novel fluorescent amino acids and peptides with a particular emphasis on those wherein triazole acts as an integral part of amino acids,