Aqueous phase synthesis of highly luminescent, nitrogen-doped carbon dots and their application as bioimaging agents.

Carbon dots are promising scaffolds for multifunctional therapeutic systems because of their fluorescence property, good biocompatibility, and low toxicity. In this work, we prepared nitrogen-doped carbon dots through an aqueous phase strategy using folic acid as precursor. The carbon dots possess many attractive features including uniform dispersion with size about 9 nm, bright photoluminescence, high photoluminescence quantum yield of 23%, and low toxicity, making them excellent imaging probes for biomedical applications.