Synthesis of Carbon Dots from Spider silk: Conversion of waste to valuable product

Abstract

Utilization of biomass as renewable and sustainable resource has attracted much attention of scientific community around the world. Herein, for the first time we report a green synthesis approach for carbon dots (CDs) from spider silk (Crossopriza lyoni) done by simple thermal pyrolysis at low temperature of 250⁰C. The synthesized CDs are comprehensively characterized by XRD, Raman, UV-visible and photoluminescence spectroscopy. The obtained higher band gap confirms the formation of CDs. The obtained results demonstrate that the prepared CDs have great potential application towards bio sensing, photovoltaic application, bio imaging and even disease diagnosis.