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Biocompatible Carbon Dot Decorated α-FeOOH Nanohybrid for an Effective Fluorometric Sensing of Cr (VI) in Wastewater and Living Cells

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Abstract

This article reports the fluorometric detection of toxic hexavalent chromium Cr (VI)) in wastewater and Cr (VI) contaminated living cells using in-situ grown carbon quantum dots into the goethite (α-FeOOH) nano-matrix. The synthesized nano-hybrid shows enormous potential in determining the chromium contamination levels in various types of water samples. This selective fluorometric probe is enormously sensitive (LOD 81 nM) toward hexavalent chromium, which makes it a dedicated chromium sensor. Moreover, the sensing mechanism has been assessed using Stern–Volmer’s equation and fluorescence lifetime experiments showing the simultaneous occurrence of photoinduced electron transfer and the inner filter effect. This chromium sensor has also been employed to assess the contamination level in real-life industrial wastewater. The performance of this probe in a real-life wastewater sample is quite commendable. Further, this biocompatible fluorometric probe has been used to demonstrate the in-vitro sensing of Cr (VI) in HeLa cells. The rapid detection mechanism of hexavalent chromium in living cells has been validated using theoretical docking simulations. Henceforth, this fluorometric sensor material could open new avenues not only in wastewater monitoring but also in biomedical applications.

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Data Availability Statement

The data will be available at the reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Department of Physics, Jadavpur University, for extending experimental facilities.

Funding

S.D and D.M would like to acknowledge DST-SERB (Grant No. EEQ/2018/000747) for.

funding. S.R and B.G would like to acknowledge the Dept. of Higher Education, Govt. of West.

Bengal for providing them with the SVMCM fellowship.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Bidisha Ghosh and Shubham Roy are authors contributed equally in this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Jadavpur University, Kolkata-700032, India

    Bidisha Ghosh, Shubham Roy, Souravi Bardhan, Dhananjoy Mondal, Saheli Ghosh, Kaustuv Das & Sukhen Das

  2. Department of Life Science and Biotechnology, Jadavpur University, Kolkata-700032, India

    Ishita Saha & Parimal Karmakar

  3. Department of Physics, Jogamaya Devi College, Kolkata- 700026, India

    Ruma Basu

Authors
  1. Bidisha Ghosh
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Contributions

Bidisha Ghosh: Data curation, Writing- Original draft preparation. Shubham Roy: Conceptualization, Software, Writing- Reviewing and Editing. Souravi Bardhan: Data curation, Investigation, Writing- Assistance. Dhananjoy Mondal: Data curation, Investigation, Software. Ishita Saha: Investigation. Saheli Ghosh: Data curation, Investigation. Ruma Basu: Writing- Reviewing and Editing. Parimal Karmakar: Writing- Reviewing and Editing, Resources. Kaustuv Das: Supervision, Funding acquisition. Sukhen Das: Supervision, Funding acquisition.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Kaustuv Das or Sukhen Das.

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Ghosh, B., Roy, S., Bardhan, S. et al. Biocompatible Carbon Dot Decorated α-FeOOH Nanohybrid for an Effective Fluorometric Sensing of Cr (VI) in Wastewater and Living Cells. J Fluoresc 32, 1489–1500 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10895-022-02962-x

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