A ratiometric strategy to detect hydrogen sulfide with a gold nanoclusters based fluorescent probe

Abstract

The emergence of ratiometric fluorescent probes have offered more convincing results to the bioanalytical field of research. In particular, using nanoparticles as scaffolds for the construction of ratiometric systems has received increasing attention. In this work, a novel design strategy was implemented for ratiometric sensing of hydrogen sulfide (H2S), in which bovine serum albumin templated gold nanoclusters (BSA-AuNCs) was served as the internal reference fluorophore and HSip-1, a azamacrocyclic Cu2+ complex based fluorescent probe toward H2S, acted as both the signal indicator and specific recognition element. Under single wavelength excitation, the nanohybrid probe HSip-1@AuNC emitted dual fluorescence at 519 and 632nm, coming from HSip-1 and AuNCs respectively. The effective fluorescence response of organic dye to H2S and constant fluorescence of AuNCs enabled the proposed HSip-1@AuNC to achieve the ratiometric measurement with a dynamic linear range of 7–100μM and a detection limit of 0.73μM. This probe also possesses high selectivity, stability against pH change and continuously light illumination. In addition, we provided HSip-1@AuNC as a valuable tool to analyze sulfides in serum samples and perfect recoveries verified its potential in biological applications.