Optical tuning of polymer functionalized zinc oxide quantum dots as a selective probe for specific detection of antibiotics

Abstract

It is crucial to monitor the antibiotic levels in the environment like water, food products in the current scenario as the antibiotic concentration above threshold is harmful for the human health. Excess consumption of antibiotics leads to antibiotic resistance that hinders the control and cure of microbial diseases. So, these challenges motivated to devise an optical nano-senor which can sense the ultra-low concentration of antibiotics. In this proposed research work, emphasis is to develop a method which is simple and selective to analyze the detection and presence of antibiotics in various samples like tape water milk etc. using fluorescent ZnO QDs based nano-sensor. For this, fluorescent and different polymers (polyvinylalcohol - PVA and polyvinylpyrrolidine - PVP) capped ZnO QDs were synthesized using modified sol-gel technique. These were used as fluorescent probe to monitor the presence of antibiotics. The optical characterizations of synthesized QDs were performed using UV-Visible absorption & fluorescence spectroscopic methods while structural characteristics were analyzed by using FTIR, XRD and EDX. Charge on the synthesized QDs were obtained with the help of ZETA potential. Here ten different antibiotics were targeted among, Ciprofloxacin and Moxifloxacin have shown excellent sensing and specificity with PVA-ZnO QDs and PVP-ZnO QDs respectively.