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Highly Efficient Red-Emitting Carbon Dots with Gram-Scale Yield for Bioimaging.

Hui DingJi-Shi WeiNing ZhongQing-Yu GaoHuan-Ming Xiong
Published in: Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids (2017)
Carbon dots (CDs) are a new class of photoluminescent (PL), biocompatible, environment-friendly, and low-cost carbon nanomaterials. Synthesis of highly efficient red-emitting carbon dots (R-CDs) on a gram scale is a great challenge at present, which heavily restricts the wide applications of CDs in the bioimaging field. Herein, R-CDs with a high quantum yield (QY) of 53% are produced on a gram scale by heating a formamide solution of citric acid and ethylenediamine. The as-prepared R-CDs have an average size of 4.1 nm and a nitrogen content of about 30%, with an excitation-independent emission at 627 nm. After detailed characterizations, such strong red fluorescence is ascribed to the contribution from the nitrogen- and oxygen-related surface states and the nitrogen-derived structures in the R-CD cores. Our R-CDs show good photostability and low cytotoxicity, and thus they are excellent red fluorescence probes for bioimaging both in vitro and in vivo.
Keyphrases
  • quantum dots
  • highly efficient
  • energy transfer
  • low cost
  • gram negative
  • single molecule
  • photodynamic therapy
  • small molecule
  • high resolution
  • fluorescent probe
  • living cells
  • drug induced
  • nucleic acid