Ligands engineering of gold nanoclusters with enhanced photoluminescence for deceptive information encryption and glutathione detection

Mengyuan Chen; Zhenqiang Ning; Xue Ge; Erli Yang; Qian Sun; Fei Yin; Mingming Zhang; Yuanjian Zhang; Yanfei Shen

doi:10.1016/j.bios.2022.114805

Ligands engineering of gold nanoclusters with enhanced photoluminescence for deceptive information encryption and glutathione detection

Biosens Bioelectron. 2023 Jan 1:219:114805. doi: 10.1016/j.bios.2022.114805. Epub 2022 Oct 17.

Authors

Mengyuan Chen¹, Zhenqiang Ning¹, Xue Ge¹, Erli Yang¹, Qian Sun¹, Fei Yin¹, Mingming Zhang¹, Yuanjian Zhang¹, Yanfei Shen²

Affiliations

¹ School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Medical School, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210009, China.
² School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Medical School, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210009, China; Center of Clinical Laboratory Medicine, Zhongda Hospital, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210009, China; Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Critical Care Medicine, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210009, China. Electronic address: Yanfei.Shen@seu.edu.cn.

PMID: 36279824
DOI: 10.1016/j.bios.2022.114805

Abstract

Gold nanoclusters (Au NCs) have appeared as an essential alternative to traditional quantum dots and fluorescent molecules for the development of intelligent stimuli-responsive photoluminescence (PL), but the low PL emission of Au NCs restricts their broad applications. Herein, we reported a simple yet effective strategy for preparing Au NCs with high PL by ligands engineering of 4-hydroxy-2-mercapto-6-methylpyrimidine (MTU) and L-Arginine (Arg). Owing to the rigidified shell and the ligand-to-metal charge transfer (LMCT) effects, it was found that the assembly of Arg ligand on MTU-protected Au NCs (Arg/MTU-Au NCs) led to a significantly enhanced PL in the alkaline solution up to 30 times. Moreover, utilizing the tunable LMCT, the Arg/MTU-Au NCs displayed rapid responses to multi-type ionic interaction in a reversible manner, such as H⁺/OH^- and Cu²⁺/glutathione (GSH) pairs. Inspired by these intriguing ions-responsive LMCT and the associated switchable PL emission, the Arg/MTU-Au NCs were successfully used as excellent stimuli-responsive PL probes for intriguing deceptive information encryption and biosensing as well. This work would provide new insight into regulating the PL emission of Au NCs by ligands engineering and advance their potential applications in information encryption and bioassay.

Keywords: Bioassay; Charge transfer; Deceptive information encryption; Nanoclusters; Photoluminescence.