Amphiphilic carbon dots for sensitive detection, intracellular imaging of Al3+

•Amphiphilic carbon dots were obtained by simply modifying hydrophobic carbon dots.•Amphiphilic carbon dots/morin-Al3+ was used as a selective turn-on probe for Al3+.•The method was employed to intracellular imaging Al3+ in living cells.

In this paper, a simple and effective method was designed to synthesize hydrophobic carbon dots. Subsequently, amphiphilic fluorescent carbon dots (A-CDs) were synthesized by further surface modification. The result A-CDs show excellent optical properties with a quantum yield of 16.9%. It was interestingly found that morin (MR) and its fluorescent metal-ion complex (MR-Al3+) can successfully coordinate on the surface of A-CDs, the emission of A-CDs completely overlapped the absorption peak of MR-Al3+. Thus, the prepared A-CDs can be used as an effective fluorescent probe for Al3+ based on a fluorescence resonance energy transfer process. The sensing platform can realize real-time detection of Al3+ within 0.5 min. The fluorescence signals of the system were linearly correlated with the concentration of Al3+ over a range of 8-20 μM, with a detection limit of 0.113 μM. The method was also successfully applied to image the distribution of Al3+ in Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cells.

Graphical abstractDownload high-res image (178KB)Download full-size image