Abstract
Berberine hydrochloride (BH) is an isoquinoline alkaloid normally used as drug to treat diseases. Compared with the traditional detection methods, the carbon quantum dots (CQDs) have better selectivity, high sensitivity, easy operation, and is inexpensive which could be widely utilized as fluorescent nanoprobes to detect various compounds quantificationally. And ratiometric fluorescent sensors conspicuously increase sensitivity and precision detection and improve quantification. In this work, we use water-soluble and fluorescent cationic carbon dots cetylpyridinium chloride monohydrate (CPC)-CQDs to connect with pinacyanol chloride (PC) and sodium tetraphenylborate (ST) as the ratiometric fluorescent probe to detect BH. The ratiometric fluorescent probe has high sensitivity towards alkaloids and metal ions, photochemical stability (60 min), and pH stability (from 6.0 to 8.0), with the detection range from 0 to 200 μM, and limit was as low as 57.35 nM. The accuracy of the method was verified by spiked recovery experiment in different human blood serums which were drawn from healthy adult volunteers to explore the practicability. The recoveries were in the range 94.34 to 105.48% with relative standard deviations (RSD) of 0.80 to 2.92%. In addition, we could observe that the fluorescence was gradually darkened, and the color turned yellow to realize the visual detection. It is expected that this work would open up a new strategy for detecting BH in the environment and human blood serums.
Highlights
Berberine hydrochloride (BH) is an isoquinoline alkaloid from the Berberis species
cetylpyridinium chloride monohydrate (CPC)-CQDs were carbon quantum dots with CPC as the carbon source because the CPC-CQDs had positively charged surfaces, so it could as the electron donor group (EDG)
While quaternary ammonium group could as the electron withdrawing group (EWG), formed a “push-pull” electron conjugate system (D-π-A), which showed yellow fluorescence emission (Zheng et al, 2015)
Summary
Berberine hydrochloride (BH) is an isoquinoline alkaloid from the Berberis species. W. Jiang et al, 2013). Liu et al Journal of Analytical Science and Technology (2021) 12:11 analysis has been widely used for pollutant analysis and detection in recent years because of its better selection, high sensitivity, uncomplicated instruments, low cost, and easy operation (Baker & Baker, 2010; Das, Bandyopadhyay, & Pramanik, 2018; Molaei, 2019). As an environment-friendly optical probe, carbon quantum dots (CQDs) are widely used in the field of analysis and detection (Li, Kang, Liu, & Lee, 2012)
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