Green synthesis of luminescent nitrogen-doped carbon dots from milk and its imaging application.

In the present work, a completely green synthetic method for producing fluorescent nitrogen-doped carbon dots by using milk is introduced. The process is environmentally friendly, simple, and efficient. By hydrothermal heating of milk, we produced monodispersed, highly fluorescent carbon dots with a size of about 3 nm. Imaging of U87 cells, a human brain glioma cancer cell line, can be easily achieved with high resolution using the prepared carbon dots as probes and validates their use in imaging applications.