Nitrophenyl-based caged neurotransmitters.

Nitroaromatic photochemical protecting groups were developed for organic synthesis in 1966. Since the early 1990s, this type of chromophore has been used by neuroscientists to liberate a wide variety of amino acid neurotransmitters such as ACh, glutamate, GABA, and glycine, among others. Since 2001, several laboratories have used two-photon excitation of nitroaromatic cages for highly localized uncaging of glutamate in acute brain slices.