A facile route to ionic liquids-functionalized ZnO nanorods for the fluorometric sensing of thiabendazole drug

Abstract

In this report, we introduce a simple and cost-effective hydrothermal method for the functionalization of ZnO nanorods with three different ionic liquids (ILs (1-3)) to check their sensing response with various drugs including thiabendazole, phenylbutazone, chloramphenicol, neomycin, and theophylline through fluorescence spectroscopy. The rod like-microstructure and hexagonal wurtzite structure of synthesized ZnO nanorods were examined with SEM-EDS and XRD techniques. On the other hand, ionic liquids-functionalized ZnO nanorods (ILs (1-3)/ZnO) exhibited various self-organized (layered-sheet similar to IL1, distorted nanorods similar to IL2, peanut beaded surface similar to IL3/ZnO) structures due to the intercalation of ILs on the surface of ZnO nanorods. Compared to ZnO nanorods, similar to ILs (1-3)/ZnO nanorods showed a blue shift in UV-absorption band which resulted to the variation in optical bandgap values. Ionic liquids-functionalized nanorods samples (ILs (1-3)/ZnO) have been selected for their recognition behaviour with available drug molecules using fluorescence spectroscopic technique. Interestingly, with the addition of thiabendazole drug molecules to two samples (ILs (1,3)/ZnO), a significant response corresponding to the peaks at similar to 350 nm and similar to 357 nm was observed, which led to the development of fluorescent sensors with a detection limit of 12 and 304 nM, respectively. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.