Youth Chemistry Conference 2nd Youth Chemistry Conference booklet | Page 23

Surface Enhanced Fluorescence of Carbon Dot labelled Bacteria Cells observed on Aluminum Foil Saida Zhunussova, Zhanar Kunushpayeva, Rostislav Bukasov* Department of Chemistry, School of Science and Technology, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan Email: [email protected], [email protected] Abstract Surface enhanced fluorescence (SEF) is based on the interaction of fluorophore with the metallic surface 1 . Gold and silver particles are most commonly used substrates for SEF. Several studies suggest that aluminum also can be used as an enhancement material due to its advantages in terms of cost, availability and inherent sustainability 2 . In this experiment strong SEF signal is observed from aluminum foil with E coli bacteria cells labeled with Carbon nanodots (CDs), which were synthesized from date pits (D1). P-doped and N-doped CDs have less intense fluorescence in comparison with D1 CDs. The enhancement factor (EF) for SEF of the single cell on aluminum foil is about 12, which is higher than EF values for aluminum film and gold. Those EFs are ratios of emission peak areas from CDs labeled cell on Al foil, Al film or Au film to the peak areas of the same cell on glass substrate. In near future this experiment is going to be repeated by using commercial carbon dots. References 1. K. Aslan, I. Gryczynski, J. Malicka, E. Matveeva, J. Lakowicz, C. Geddes. Curr. Opin. Biotechnol. 16 (2005) 55-62. 2. N. Akbay, J. Lakowicz, K. Ray. J. Phys. Chem C 116 (2012) 10766-10773.