Abstract
Nitrogen- and iron-containing carbon dots (N,Fe-CDs) are synthesized by hydrothermal treatment of branched polyethylenimine (BPEI) and hemin at 180 °C. The N,Fe-CDs are mainly doped with nitrogen and trace amounts of iron(III). The N,Fe-CDs also display intrinsic fluorescence with excitation/emission maxima at 365/452 nm and a quantum yield of 27 %. The nanodots are shown to act as peroxidase mimics by catalyzing the oxidation of tetramethylbenzidine (TMB) by hydrogen peroxide to form a blue product whose quantity can be determined by photometry at 652 nm. This was exploited to design colorimetric and fluorometric assays for dopamine (DA). The colorimetric assay is based on the oxidation of DA by H2O2 in presence of the N,Fe-CDs and TMB. It has an instrumental detection limit of 40 nM (at an S/N ratio of 3), and a visual detection limit of 0.4 μM. The fluorometric assay is based on an inner filter effect that is caused by the formation of oxidized TMB which overlaps (and absorbs) the emission of the N,Fe-CDs located at 452 nm. The fluorometric detection limit is as low as 20 nM (at an S/N ratio of 3).
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by PhD start-up grants SWU113112, SWU113111 from Southwest University, National Natural Science Foundation of China (21505108) and Chongqing Key Laboratory for Advanced Materials and Technologies of Clean Energies (Grant cstc2011pt).
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Wang, B., Chen, Y., Wu, Y. et al. Synthesis of nitrogen- and iron-containing carbon dots, and their application to colorimetric and fluorometric determination of dopamine. Microchim Acta 183, 2491–2500 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00604-016-1885-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00604-016-1885-5