Biomass-derived nitrogen doped graphene quantum dots with color-tunable emission for sensing, fluorescence ink and multicolor cell imaging.

In this paper, a simple, economical, and green strategy is developed for producing nitrogen doped graphene quantum dots (N-GQDs) with multicolor light emission by hydrothermal treatment of Passiflora edulia Sims. The synthesized N-GQDs exhibit ideal ionic stability, hydrophilicity and anti-photobcleaching properties, and the quantum yield reaches up to about 29%. Because of with the fluorescence quenching effect, the achieved N-GQDs allow to detect Ag+ in a linear range of 10 nM-160 µM, and the limit of detection is calculated to be 1.2 nM according to the S/N of 3. Noteworthy, N-GQDs with blue, green and yellow light emissions are demonstrated via regulating the reaction time and temperature, implying a promising fluorescence adjustability. Furthermore, the N-GQDs-based fluorescent probe exhibits low cytotoxicity and favorable biocompatibility. Depending on the superior properties, our N-GQDs are applied in fluorescent ink and multicolor cell imaging. Eventually, the developed sensor is highly selective and accurate for Ag+ analysis in real water, which demonstrates the promising practical use in environmental determination and/or biomedical engineering.

Polarizing Graphene Quantum Dots toward Long-Acting Intracellular Reactive Oxygen Species Evaluation and Tumor Detection.

The evaluation of intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) would greatly deepen the understanding of cell metabolism/proliferation and tumor detection. However, current long-acting level tracking techniques for intracellular ROS remain unsuited to practical applications. To solve this problem, we synthesized cyclotriphosphazene-doped graphene quantum dots (C-GQDs) whose quantum yield is highly sensitive to ROS (increased by 400% from 0.12 to 0.63). Electron cloud polarization of oxidized cyclotriphosphazene rings in C-GQDs is confirmed to account for this novel optical property by density functional theory calculations and experimental results. In combination with excellent biological stability, C-GQDs achieve a long-acting evaluation of intracellular ROS level (more than 72 h) with an accuracy of 98.3%. In addition, recognition rates exceeding 90% are demonstrated to be feasible for eight kinds of tumor cell lines cultured with C-GQDs, which can also be expanded to in vivo detection. C-GQDs also show a high recognition rate (82.33%) and sensitivity (79.65%) for tumor cells in blood samples.