Carbon dots derived from rose flowers for tetracycline sensing

Herein, an innovative and simple method for synthesizing carbon dots (CDs) with satisfactory fluorescence has been successfully established while rose flowers served as carbon source for the first time. Meanwhile, the fluorescence (FL) mechanism of current CDs was elucidated in detail by fluorescence, UV–vis, HR-TEM, and FTIR-based analyses. Subsequently, this type of CDs was employed for detecting tetracycline (TC) on the basis of the interactions between TC and CDs, and allowed quenching their fluorescence. Moreover, the proposed analytical strategy permitted detecting TC in a linear range of 1.0×10−8−1.0×10−4 mol/L with a detection limit of 3.3×10−9 mol/L at a signal-to-noise ratio of 3. Significantly, the CDs described here were further applied for fluorescent coding, demonstrating their promising future towards various applications in analytic science.