Facile synthesis of carbon nanocubes and its applications for sensing antibiotics

Abstract

Conversion of natural resources into value added products has attracted fabulous concern owing to their exceptional properties such as stability, biocompatibility, tunable emission and low toxicity. Herein, an inexpensive, environmentally benign and green method was adapted to synthesis of carbonaceous nanomaterials via hydrothermal process of mahua flowers without any additives. Cubical shape and average particle size of 4–5 nm was revealed from electron microscopic measurements. The prepared carbon nanocubes (CNCs) are rich in carbon and oxygenous functionality and the various chemical compositions was confirmed by spectroscopic measurements. CNCs are excitation dependent fluorescent in nature and exhibits the quantum yield of 7%. Under optimized conditions, the prepared CNCs were used to modify the glassy carbon electrode for the sensitive detection of antibiotics such as nitrofurazone and sulfamethoxazole via electrochemical method and LOD was calculated as 80 μM and 13 μM respectively. Additionally, fluorescence based sensing of nitrofurazone with a limit of detection as low as 0.7 μM has been discriminated. Inner filter effect (IFE) based quenching mechanism is proven via time resolved fluorescence technique. Moreover, this method was successfully applied to nitrofurazone discrimination in commercial milk sample. Therefore, the practicability of CNCs obtained from mahua flowers has also been validated.