One-step, green, and economic synthesis of water-soluble photoluminescent carbon dots by hydrothermal treatment of wheat straw, and their bio-applications in labeling, imaging, and sensing

Abstract The use of biomass as renewable and sustainable energy source has attracted the attention of politics and research and development (R&D) facilities around the world. Agricultural straw acts as a typical biowaste, which still needs highly effective recycling to save the biomass urgently at present. Photoluminescent carbon dots (C-dots) are novel biocompatible nanomaterials that have been proved to be produced from many carbon-abundant materials and hold great promise for the modern nanobiomedicine. In order to realize a “one-stone-two-birds” strategy, we report a green, economic, one-pot method in this article for synthesizing photoluminescent C-dots by hydrothermal treatment of wheat straw. Using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and X-ray diffraction (XRD), we show that the as-prepared C-dots are amorphous in structure and are mainly composed of carbon. Their tiny size (