Biomass-based carbon dots: Synthesis and application in imatinib determination

Water-soluble carbon dots (CDs) have been synthesized by chemical oxidation treatment of the starch. The as-prepared CDs exhibit high fluorescence intensity, excitation-dependent photoluminescence behavior and bright blue fluorescence under ultraviolet lamp. Based on fluorescence quenching, a novel method for the determination of imatinib was developed with CDs. The linear relationship between the change of fluorescence intensity and the concentration of imatinib (10–400 μg mL−1) was obtained with a relation coefficient of 0.9977. The recovery was in the range of 98.0–102.0% with a relative standard deviation of 1.5%, and the limit of detection was 2.4 × 10−3 μg mL−1. The possible quenching mechanism between CDs and imatinib was found to be charge transfer.