Abstract
Magnetic nanoparticles with attractive optical properties have been proposed for applications in such areas as separation and magnetic resonance imaging. In this paper, a simple and novel fluorescent sensor of Zn2+ was designed with 3,5-di-tert-butyl-2-hydroxybenzaldehyde [DTH] covalently grafted onto the surface of magnetic core/shell Fe3O4@SiO2 nanoparticles [NPs] (DTH-Fe3O4@SiO2 NPs) using the silanol hydrolysis approach. The DTH-Fe3O4@SiO2 inorganic-organic hybrid material was characterized by transmission electron microscopy, dynamic light scattering, X-ray power diffraction, diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform, UV-visible absorption and emission spectrometry. The compound DTH exhibited fluorescence response towards Zn2+ and Mg2+ ions, but the DTH-Fe3O4@SiO2 NPs only effectively recognized Zn2+ ion by significant fluorescent enhancement in the presence of various ions, which is due to the restriction of the N-C rotation of DTH-Fe3O4@SiO2 NPs and the formation of the rigid plane with conjugation when the DTH-Fe3O4@SiO2 is coordinated with Zn2+. Moreover, this DTH-Fe3O4@SiO2 fluorescent chemosensor also displayed superparamagnetic properties, and thus, it can be recycled by magnetic attraction.
Highlights
Zinc is the second abundant transition metal ion in the human body, which plays a vital role in various biological processes, such as gene expression [1], apoptosis [2], enzyme regulation [3], and neurotransmission [4,5]
Conventional analytical methods including atomic absorption spectrophotometry [9], inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry [10], and electrochemical method [11] can hardly be applied for Zn2+ ion detection in biological systems due to their complicated pretreatment steps and expensive
Characterization of DTH-Fe3O4@SiO2 The transmission electron microscopy (TEM) image (Figure 2A) of DTH-Fe3O4@SiO2 reveals that iron oxide NPs have entrapped in the silica shell successfully, in which the core/shell structures are in a narrow size distribution of 60 to 70 nm [46,47], and the diameter of the magnetic core is about 10 nm
Summary
Zinc is the second abundant transition metal ion in the human body, which plays a vital role in various biological processes, such as gene expression [1], apoptosis [2], enzyme regulation [3], and neurotransmission [4,5]. Various mesoscopic or nanoscopic materials can be acted as the inorganic supports in the design of fluorescent probes, including magnetic nanoparticles, nanotubes, mesoporous silica, metal nanoparticles, and TiO2 [25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34]. Among all these inorganic materials, magnetic silica core/shell nanoparticles have advantages over other competitors for biological and environmental applications [35,36,37,38,39,40,41]. With magnetic silica core/shell nanoparticles as delivery, their low toxicity and biocompatibility had advantages for the design of biological fluorescent probes
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