One-step fabrication of functional carbon dots with long wavelength emission for gene delivery and bio-imaging

As a new-type of fluorescent material, carbon dots (CDs) are promising nanoscale reagents with the potential to integrate the functions of bio-imaging and gene/drug delivery. Most of the reported CDs for nucleic acid delivery only emitted short-wavelength (blue and green) fluorescence, making them unsuitable for in vivo application. Herein, a one-step solvothermal method was applied to prepare CDs with long wavelength emission from low molecular weight PEI and rhodamine dyes for both bio-imaging and gene delivery. The structure of the CDs was confirmed by several analytical methods including ¹H NMR, FT-IR, TEM, and XPS. The results showed that the CDs possess excellent fluorescence properties, which enable their application in both in vitro and in vivo bio-imaging. Meanwhile, the CDs could also be used for the intracellular tracking of the gene delivery process. In vitro transfection results revealed that the CDs possessed high transfection efficiency, which was up to 162 times higher than that of the "golden standard" transfection reagent PEI 25 kDa. Besides, these CDs also exhibited better serum tolerance and lower cytotoxicity than PEI. A mechanistic study suggested that the CD/DNA complexes may release the nucleic acid cargo more effectively. This work provides a new method to prepare multi-functional CDs with non-viral gene delivery and long wavelength bio-imaging abilities.