%0 Journal Article
%T Facile Synthesis of Water-Soluble, Highly-Fluorescent Graphene Quantum Dots from Graphene Oxide Reduction for Efficient Cell Labelling
%J C ¡ª Journal of Carbon Research | An Open Access Journal from MDPI
%D 2019
%R https://doi.org/10.3390/c5040077
%X In this work, we report a simple, one-step, green procedure to fabricate strong blue and yellow photoluminescent graphene quantum dots (GQDs) as by-product of the synthesis of mesoporous graphene hydrogel (GHs). The graphene hydrogel was obtained by chemical reduction of graphene oxide using ascorbic acid at mild temperature. As a consequence of the network formation, small fluorescent GQDs can be isolated from the residual solvent, purified from the by-products and finally concentrated to produce GQDs. The GQDs chemistry and morphology were characterized by X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM). The GQDs mean diameter was about 5¨C10 nm and they exhibited an intense luminescence in the visible range with an excitation wavelength-dependent fluorescence. Our experiments showed that GQDs were easily internalized in living cells and furthermore, such internalization did not adversely affect cell viability. View Full-Tex
%U https://www.mdpi.com/2311-5629/5/4/77