Abstract: After applied, flonicamid reaches the interior of agricultural products and shifts to ecosystem, which proliferating the hazardous risk to consumers. In this study, nitrogen-doped carbon dots derived from covalent organic frameworks embedded in molecularly imprinted polymers (COF-derived NCDs@MIPs) were prepared by reverse microemulsion polymerization. The COF-derived NCDs@MIPs were used as a potential candidate for the optosensing of flonicamid in food samples, which combined the merits of superior physicochemical properties with the high stability of N-doped carbon dots, an efficient fluorescence-resonance charge-transfer strategy, and good specific and sensitive MIP technology. The performance of the proposed optosensing system was measured in phosphate buffered saline (PBS, pH = 7.0) over the flonicamid concentration range of 0.03-0.3 μg g-1 with a limit of detection of 0.004 μg g-1. A selectivity study was employed to evaluate the influence of five neonicotinoids on the selectivity of the COF-derived NCDs@MIPs for flonicamid molecules, which showed good affinity for flonicamid in comparison with that of the non-imprinted polymer (NIP). The application of the proposed optosensing technique in spiked food samples revealed a good recovery (86.7-98.1%). The development of easily synthesized COF-derived NCDs@MIPs with excellent performance will be greatly beneficial for trace detection of flonicamid
Template and target information: flonicamid
Author keywords: Flonicamid, molecularly imprinted polymer, optosensing, N-doped carbon dots, Covalent organic frameworks