Recent Progress on Carbon-Dots-Based Probes for Microbial Labeling and Versatile Analysis Applications

Microbial imbalance and the spread of pathogenic microorganisms pose severe threats to human health and ecological security. Traditional microbial detection methods suffer from several drawbacks such as long detection time, low sensitivity, and insufficient specificity. As an emerging fluorescent probe, carbon dots (CDs) offer an innovative direction for microbial labeling and detection due to their ultra-small particle size, unique optical properties, excellent biocompatibility, and facile surface modifiability. Herein, this article reviews the research progress of CDs on microbial labeling and detection. The content covers a brief introduction of CDs and explores the main recognition strategies including non-covalent interactions and biomolecule-mediated targeted binding. It also elaborates on the application status of multi-modal sensing technologies for microbial detection, such as CDs-based fluorescent sensing, electrochemical sensing, and surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) sensing. Additionally, the challenges faced in current research, such as achieving simultaneous detection of multiple pathogens and in vivo dynamic tracking, are analyzed, and the development prospects of CDs in fields like clinical diagnosis and public health monitoring are prospected. This review aims to provide comprehensive references for further research and application of CDs in the field of microbial detection.