The FRET efficiency was strongly dependent on the following conditions: (1) The emission band of the donor should overlap with the absorption band of the acceptor. (2) The distance between both species should be in close proximity (less than 10 nm).62 One of the advantages of C-dots as electron donor was that their emission wavelength can be manipulated by choosing different excitation wavelengths thus ensuring adaptability to any kinds of energy acceptors. For efficient FRET, the excitation wavelength of 350 nm was selected for excitation of C-dots (the energy donor) because the fluorescence at 350 nm excitation overlapped with the absorption band of R6G (the energy acceptor) to ensure the FRET process (Figure 1). Therefore, feasible energy transfer from C-dots to the rhodamine moiety was theoretically established. R6G-COOH was synthesized in two steps using R6G as the starting material (Scheme S1). Intermediate R6G-NH2 was prepared in a reaction between R6G and 1,2-ethylenediamine according to the previous report.58 R6G-NH2 was reacted with succinic acid to obtain R6G-COOH. The chemical structures of R6G-NH2 and R6G-COOH were confirmed by 1H NMR and FT-IR. R6G-COOH was designed to become immobilized on the surface of C-dots through the reaction between the
carboxylic acid group in R6G-COOH and the amino group in C-dots to form an amide linkage. Finally, rhodamine spirolactam was successfully incorporated in C-dots via the conventional DCC/DMAP method to obtain C-dots-R6G (Scheme 1). FT-IR spectra revealed the changes in the functional groups on the surface of C-dots upon surface modification (Figure S3). The as-prepared C-dots showed the characteristic bands at 1630 cm−1 for CC stretching, 2870 and 2940 cm−1 for C−H stretching, and a broad band at 3270 cm−1 corresponding to amine and hydroxyl groups. Upon surface modification with R6G-COOH, the characteristic absorption band of amide CO stretching at 1670 cm−1 was observed, which indicated that the rhodamine moieties were successfully incorporated in the C-dots. The amount of rhodamine moiety immobilized on the surface of C-dots was calculated from a calibrationcurveof rhodamine plotted with known concentrations of the open form of R6GCOOH at maximal absorption wavelength (λmax = 526 nm) using UV spectroscopy (Figure S4). It was found that the rhodamine moiety was introduced on the surface of C-dots at 5.80 × 10−2 mg/mg