Abstract
Herein, we report the synthesis of an interesting graphene quantum material called “graphene quantum pins (GQPs)”. Morphological analysis revealed the interesting pin shape (width: ~10 nm, length: 50–100 nm) and spectral analysis elucidated the surface functional groups, structural features, energy levels, and photoluminescence properties (blue emission under 365 nm). The difference between the GQPs and graphene quantum dos (GQDs) isolated from the same reaction mixture as regards to their morphological, structural, and photoluminescence properties are also discussed along with the suggestion of a growth mechanism. Cytotoxicity and cellular responses including changes in biophysical and biomechanical properties were evaluated for possible biomedical applications of GQPs. The studies demonstrated the biocompatibility of GQPs even at a high concentration of 512 μg/mL. Our results suggest GQPs can be used as a potential bio-imaging agent with desired photoluminescence property and low cytotoxicity.
Highlights
Graphene-related applications have been extensively investigated in wide-ranging fields such as solar cell, field-effect transistor, LED, drug and gene delivery, and cell culture platform [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
graphene quantum dos (GQDs) and graphene quantum pins (GQPs) were synthesized successfully using dehydration of carbonization of D-(+)-glucose by a hydrothermal process and the mechanism is given in Scheme 1
In the present case, the shape of the GQDs was spherical until 5 h with an average diameter of ~8 nm
Summary
Graphene-related applications have been extensively investigated in wide-ranging fields such as solar cell, field-effect transistor, LED, drug and gene delivery, and cell culture platform [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Quantum dots (QDs) have been studied in several fields such as LED [13], solar cells [14], and bio-imaging agent [15] due to the quantum confinement effect, and their excellent photoluminescence properties [16] These two materials have their drawbacks: Graphene is difficult to utilize in biomedical applications due to its non-homogeneous size and the problem of large scale synthesis. Studies show that the organic quantum material called GQDs having a few carbon atom layers as graphene sheets and quantum confinement effect can overcome these two problems Research fields such as delivery vector (protein, gene, and drug) [21,22,23,24], fluorescence probes for bio-imaging [25,26,27] are considered to have the potential applications to apply GQDs due to their high surface area, good biocompatibility, and excellent photoluminescence properties. An attempt is undertaken in this study to investigate the effect of GQPs on the physical/mechanical properties of cells
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