Abstract
Fluorescent carbon dots hold great promise in biomedical real-time tracking due to their outstanding optical properties and biocompatibility. Here, we report a one-pot synthetic strategy to produce multi-doped carbon dots (MCDs) with bright and color-tunable emission. The resultant MCDs are doped by abundant biogenic elements (O, N, P), so that they contain a variety of surface functional groups. Such hetero-doping and functionalization make MCDs display strong fluorescent emission and excitation-wavelength-dependent characteristic, good aqueous solubility as well as high photo-stability and ion-stability. Moreover, the as-prepared MCDs response to the change of pH values and exhibit high selective and sensitive detection of Fe3+ ions under blue light illumination with the limit of detection (LOD) of 15.9 nM. Such a Fe3+ sensing ability is further demonstrated in real water samples and extended to intracellular multi-color monitoring of Fe3+. More interestingly, the MCDs can also sense the gastrointestinal bacteria Escherichia coli, exhibiting linear sensing dependent behavior. With low cytotoxicity and tunable emission, such MCDs hold great potential as efficient multi-color probes and imaging agents for clinical diagnosis.
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