Employing phosphorescent carbon dots@silica for glutathione sensing with low background interference

Glutathione (GSH) has important physiological functions and has been implicated in several diseases. It is therefore of great physiological importance and clinical value to develop simple and efficient methods for measuring GSH levels. However, common used luminescent materials with short lifetimes inevitably generated background signal from the biological samples during light excitation. In this work, a GSH sensing method with ultralow background interference was developed using phosphorescent carbon dots (CDs). Introducing heteroatom and carbonyl group effectively activated the triplet state of phosphorescent CDs. Meanwhile, immobilization of CDs in SiO2 (CDs@SiO2) realized long-lived phosphorescent emission (lifetime of 1.54 s) in aqueous dispersion. Manganese dioxide (MnO2) quenched the phosphorescence of CDs@SiO2 via inner filter effect and triplet energy transfer, yet the phosphorescence was restored when GSH was present. The phosphorescence was recorded when the excitation source was turned off, which successfully eliminated the background fluorescence of biological samples. The work presented here will promote the fabrication of bioprobes with low background.