Simultaneous biosensing of CA125 and CA15-3 tumor markers and imaging of OVCAR-3 and MCF-7 cells lines via bi-color FRET phenomenon using dual blue-green luminescent carbon dots with single excitation wavelength

Here, we developed a facile route to synthesize two CDs with the maximum emission locates at 326 nm and 443 nm under 230 nm excitation. The absolute photoluminescence quantum yield (QY) is as high as 29% and 52% for CD-1 and CD-2 with strong blue-green fluorescence, respectively. The functionalized CDs (CDs-NH2, CDs-COOH) conjugated with antibodies used for simultaneous detection of two tumor-markers using fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) strategy, when MoS2 nanosheets functionalized with ssDNA related aptamers applied as quencher. The response of sensor enhanced gradually with increasing of targets at range 0.05-8 pg/mL with detection limit (DL) 5.0 fg/mL for CA125, while for CA15-3 concentration range was 1.0-35 pg/mL and DL was 0.5 pg/mL. This strategy revealed a stable analytical performance for the detection of OVCAR-3 and MCF-7 cells lines ranging from 1000 to 10,000 cells/mL with DL 2-3 cells in 10 μL of injected sample. When the CDs-Ab was used in selective imaging of MCF-7 and OVCAR-3 cancer cells, a strong PL emission was observed. After incubation times, both the cells size and shape clearly remained without any change. The results demonstrate that the CDs are a potentially excellent bioimaging component in pathological diagnosis, biomedicine research and management of cancer diseases.