A novel turn-on carbon dot fluorescent probe for hypochlorous acid detection

The detection of hypochlorous acid is of great significance in fields such as physiological and pathological detection and water safety detection. Although various carbon dot-based fluorescent probes for HClO have been developed, the vast majority are quenching-type, and reports on turn-on ones remain very rare. To this end, this study designed and synthesized a novel turn-on carbon dot-based fluorescent probe for the efficient detection of HClO. Experimental results show that the aqueous solution of the carbon dots emits bright yellow fluorescence after the addition of HClO. Fluorescence titration experiments indicate that the turn-on fluorescence intensity of the carbon dots has a good linear relationship with the HClO concentration with a detection limit as low as 0.03342 μM. Anti-interference experiments confirm that the probe has good anti-interference ability against common other reactive oxygen species, metal ions and amino acids; when applied to the detection of actual environmental water samples, the spiked recovery rate is between 93.7% and 108.2%, with good accuracy. In summary, the carbon dot fluorescent probe designed in this study not only enriches the types of fluorescent detection for HClO, but also, as a rare turn-on carbon dot-based HClO probe, is expected to provide reference ideas for the design of new turn-on carbon dot-based HClO fluorescent probes in the future.