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A FRET Based Composite Sensing Material Based on UCNPs and Rhodamine Derivative for Highly Sensitive and Selective Detection of Fe3+

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Abstract

The existence of excessive concentration of iron ion (Fe3+) in water will do harm to the environment and biology. Presently, sensitive and selective determination of Fe3+ directly in real environment samples is still a challenging job because of the high complexity of the sample matrix. In this work, we reported a new sensor system for Fe3+ based on fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) from upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) to Rhodamine derivative probe (RhB). The NaYF4: Yb, Er@SiO2@P(NIPAM-co-RhB) nanocomposites was constructed, in which PNIPAm was used as the probe carrier. The nanocomposites can not only be excited by infrared light to avoid the interference of background light in the Fe3+ detection process, but also enhance the detection signal output through temperature control. Under the optimum conditions, the RSD (Relative standard deviation) of actual sample measurements ranges was from 1.95% to 4.96%, with the recovery rate from 97.4% to 103.3%, which showed high reliability for Fe3+ detection. This work could be extended to sensing other target ions or molecules and may promote the widespread use of FRET technique.

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Data Availability

The date that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20190862), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (No. 2019M651729).

Funding

The work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20190862), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (No. 2019M651729).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Advanced Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, 212013, Jiangsu, China

    Xu Tang, Yunlong Han, Wencheng Zhou & Wenjing Shen

  2. School of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, Zhenjiang, 212003, China

    Yemei Wang

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  1. Xu Tang
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  2. Yunlong Han
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Contributions

The study conception and design were performed by Xu Tang. Method development and validation were performed by Xu Tang, Yunlong Han and Wencheng Zhou. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Xu Tang. The Schemes 1 and 2 in the manuscript was drawn by Yemei Wang and Wenjing Shen. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xu Tang.

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Tang, X., Han, Y., Zhou, W. et al. A FRET Based Composite Sensing Material Based on UCNPs and Rhodamine Derivative for Highly Sensitive and Selective Detection of Fe3+. J Fluoresc 33, 2219–2228 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10895-023-03223-1

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