Issue 35, 2021

Turning waste into wealth: facile and green synthesis of carbon nanodots from pollutants and applications to bioimaging

Abstract

In an effort to turn waste into wealth, Reactive Red 2 (RR2), a common and refractory organic pollutant in industrial wastewater, has been employed for the first time as a precursor to synthesize carbon nanodots (CNDs) by a facile, green and low-cost route, without utilization of any strong acids or other oxidizers. The detailed characterizations have confirmed that the synthesized CNDs exhibit good water dispersibility, with a mean particle size of 2.43 nm and thickness of 1–3 layers. Importantly, the excellent fluorescence properties and much reduced biotoxicity of the CNDs confer its potential applications in further biological imaging, which has been successfully verified in both in vitro (cell culture) and in vivo (zebrafish) model systems. Thus, it is demonstrated that the synthesized CNDs exhibit nice biocompatibility and fluorescence properties for bioimaging. This work not only provides a novel economical and environmentally friendly approach in recycling a chemical pollutant, but also greatly promotes the potential application of CNDs in biological imaging.

Graphical abstract: Turning waste into wealth: facile and green synthesis of carbon nanodots from pollutants and applications to bioimaging

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
25 Maijs 2021
Accepted
01 Aug. 2021
First published
02 Aug. 2021
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2021,12, 11722-11729

Turning waste into wealth: facile and green synthesis of carbon nanodots from pollutants and applications to bioimaging

W. Chen, J. Shen, Z. Wang, X. Liu, Y. Xu, H. Zhao and D. Astruc, Chem. Sci., 2021, 12, 11722 DOI: 10.1039/D1SC02837E

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements