A subazaporphyrin (SubAP), tert-butylated and crowned subphthalocyanines (tBSubPc and SubCRPc), a mu-oxo dimer of tert-butylated SubPc {(tBSubPc)(2)O}, a subnaphthalocyanine (SubNc), and monosubstituted type unsymmetrical phthalocyanine (Pc) and naphthalocyanine (Nc) analogues have been synthesized. In particular, unsymmetrical Pc's and Nc's have been prepared in moderate yields by the ring expansion reaction of structurally distorted SubPc's and SubNc's with isoindolediimine derivatives in dimethyl sulfoxide-chloronaphthalene (or chlorobenzenes or aromatic hydrocarbons such as toluene and xylene) mixtures. The compounds have been characterized by electronic absorption, magnetic circular dichroism (MCD), fluorescence emission, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Both the Soret bands and Q-bands shift to longer wavelength and gain intensity in the order SubAP, SubPc, and SubNc. Fluorescence quantum yields and lifetimes generally decrease with decreasing molecular symmetry. Circular dichroism and NMR spectroscopy have revealed that a SubPc with three 15-crown-5 ether voids having a phenyl group as an axial ligand (SubCRPc) forms inclusion complexes with 2,6-dimethyl-beta-cyclodextrin in acetonitrile or water-acetonitrile mixtures, while the electronic absorption spectroscopy suggests that it is not dimerized by the addition of cations such as K+, Rb+, Ce+, i.e., cations which are effective in dimerizing Pc's with 15-crown-5 ether voids. Molecular orbital (MO) calculations within the framework of the Pariser-Parr-Pople approximation have succeeded in reproducing the optical absorption experimental data of not only the parent subazamacrocycles but also Pc derivatives with lower symmetry obtained by the ring expansion reaction. The correspondence between MO calculations and experiments suggests strongly that, in the metal-free unsymmetrical Pc's, two pyrrole hydrogen atoms are bound to the nitrogens along the short axis. Comparison of formation, bonding, and donation energies between SubPc and typical Pc, i.e., MgPc by natural bond orbital analysis, suggests that the distortion energy is not the major reason for the ring expansion reactivity of SubPc, and that the lack of donor-acceptor stabilization in B-N(pyrrole) bonds destabilizes SubPc. Band deconvolution of the electronic absorption and MCD spectra of SubPc with the same set of bands (with the same centers and width) experimentally identified that the excited state of the Q-band of SubPc is orbitally degenerate, with three degenerate transitions located in the 250-450-nm region. In particular, the transition at 359 nm corresponds to a shoulder seen on the red side of the Soret band tail. Time-resolved EPR analysis has shown that the size of the pi-system of SubPc is, indeed, smaller than that of Pc's.