Facile Hydrothermal Synthesis of Chlorella-Derived Environmentally Friendly Fluorescent Carbon Dots for Differentiation of Living and Dead Chlorella
Deming Dong, Tianjiao Liu, Dapeng Liang, Xipeng Jin, Zihan Qi, Anfeng Li, Ning Yang
Abstract
The judgment of microalgae viability is a vital procedure in the process of microalgae culture and treatment, which also plays an important role in bioremediation, bioindication, and pharmacology fields. The current conventional methods for defining living/dead microalgal cells are complicated or laborious. Hence, developing a simple and reliable detection method for microalgae viability is still challenging. Here, we developed chlorella-based carbonized polymer dots (c-CPDs) by a hydrothermal method. Due to their small average size of 5.0 nm, obvious excitation-dependent emission, stable fluorescence properties, and low toxicity, c-CPDs could be used for distinguishing living or dead chlorella by testing different fluorescence characteristics of c-CPD-labeled chlorella. Compared with conventional cellular dyes used for differentiating living/dead microalgae, c-CPDs significantly reduced toxicity, showing good sensitivity and reliability. This work provided a method to prepare environmentally friendly carbon dots (CDs) using microalgae, which had potential to be prepared on a large scale and might be applied feasibly in the preparation of doped CDs by controlling the growth of chlorella.