Antibiotics mediated facile one-pot synthesis of gold nanoclusters as fluorescent sensor for ferric ions

In this paper, the cheap, easily obtained small antibiotic molecule of vancomycin was employed as reducer/stabilizer for facile one-pot synthesis of water exhibited a bluish fluorescence emission at 410 nm within a short synthesis time about 50 min. Based on the strong fluorescence quenching due to electron transfer mechanism by the introduction of ferric ions(Fe3+), the Van-AuNCs were interestingly designed for sensitive and selective detecting Fe3+ with a limit of 1.4 μmol L−1 in the linear range of 2-100 μmol L−1 within 20 min. The Van-AuNCs based method was successfully applied to determine Fe3+ in tap water, lake water, river water and sea water samples with the quantitative spike recoveries from 97.50-111.14% with low relative standard deviations ranging from 0.49-1.87%, indicating the potential application of this Van-AuNCs based fluorescent sensor for environmental sample analysis.