title: Rapid solid-phase microwave synthesis of highly photoluminescent nitrogen-doped carbon dots for Fe(3+) detection and cellular bioimaging.
abstract: Recently, carbon dots (CDs) have been playing an increasingly important role in industrial production and biomedical field because of their excellent properties. As such, finding an efficient method to quickly synthesize a large scale of relatively high purity CDs is of great interest. Herein, a facile and novel microwave method has been applied to prepare nitrogen doped CDs (N-doped CDs) within 8 min using L-glutamic acid as the sole reaction precursor in the solid phase condition. The as-prepared N-doped CDs with an average size of 1.64 nm are well dispersed in aqueous solution. The photoluminescence of N-doped CDs is pH-sensitive and excitation-dependent. The N-doped CDs show a strong blue fluorescence with relatively high fluorescent quantum yield of 41.2%, which remains stable even under high ionic strength. Since the surface is rich in oxygen-containing functional groups, N-doped CDs can be applied to selectively detect Fe(3+) with the limit of detection of 10(-5) M. In addition, they are also used for cellular bioimaging because of their high fluorescent intensity and nearly zero cytotoxicity. The solid-phase microwave method seems to be an effective strategy to rapidly obtain high quality N-doped CDs and expands their applications in ion detection and cellular bioimaging.
authors: Key Laboratory for Thin Film and Microfabrication of Ministry of Education, Department of Micro/Nano Electronics, School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, People's Republic of China.
authors: Guili
authors: G
authors: He
authors: Minghan
authors: M
authors: Xu
authors: Mengjun
authors: M
authors: Shu
authors: Xiaolin
authors: X
authors: Li
authors: Zhi
authors: Z
authors: Yang
authors: Liling
authors: L
authors: Zhang
authors: Yanjie
authors: Y
authors: Su
authors: Nantao
authors: N
authors: Hu
authors: Yafei
authors: Y
authors: Zhang
mesh_terms: D002244:Carbon; D007501:Iron; D008872:Microwaves; D009584:Nitrogen; D010100:Oxygen; D045663:Quantum Dots
chemical_list: D002244:Carbon; D007501:Iron; D009584:Nitrogen; D010100:Oxygen