Ultrasonic Levitation Constructing Palladium Doped Near-Infrared Carbon Dots as Nanoprobe for Sensing and Imaging of Carbon Monoxide

Abstract

Carbon monoxide (CO), as a crucial gasotransmitter and reactive carbon species, not only plays critical roles in regulating various physiological and pathophysiological processes, but also highly toxic even in low concentration. Combining commonly fluorescence imaging with carbon dots (CDs) nanomaterial to construct nanoprobes for effect sensing and visualizing of CO is full of importance. Here we established a smart near-infrared (NIR) nanoprobe Pd-CDs through a unique ultrasonic levitation method. Specifically, we show that ultrasonic levitation can form CDs within 5 min and significantly shift the emission exceeding over 150 nm to NIR region. We also found that ultrasonic levitation can optimize for enhanced loading rate of Pd with significantly promoted selective and sensitive efficacy. Hence, the sensing of CO can be achieved within 10 s and simultaneously, excellent selectivity, superior sensitivity with low detection limit of 0.19 nM. Significantly, the nanoprobe was elucidated with low cytotoxicity and high practicability for visual sensing and imaging of exogenous and endogenous CO in living cells. Together, our findings underscore that ultrasonic levitation is not only preponderant in conveniently construction of smart nanoprobes based on CDs with advanced photo, chemical and sensing property, but also yield new insights for efficacious effectively monitoring of potential CO-involved reactions in biological systems..