If the above statement is accurate, then it should be possible to append trifluoromethyl diazirine groups to better chromophores than the simple substituted benzene rings summarized in Fig. . Doing so may allow the diazirine to be activated with longer wavelengths of light, and might even allow for two-photon activation using red light. To test this hypothesis, we sought to pursue a synthesis of a representative molecule in which a diazirine was attached to a suitable dye molecule. In principle, several different dyes could have been chosen for this purpose, but we opted to use a 9,9dimethylfluorene scaffold as our chromophore, since we felt that it constituted an ideal platform for testing our central hypothesis around the degree of conjugation between the diazirine group and the attached aromatic pi system.