| Summary: | As lactoferrin (LF) plays an essential role in physiological processes, the detection of LF has attracted increasing attention in the field of disease diagnosis. However, most current methods require expensive equipment, laborious pretreatment, and long processing time. In this work, carboxyl-rich carbon dots (COOH-CDs) were facilely prepared through a one-step, low-cost hydrothermal process with tartaric acid as the precursor. The COOH-CDs had abundant carboxyl on the surface and showed strong blue emission. Moreover, COOH-CDs were used as a fluorescent sensor toward Fe<sup>3+</sup> and showed high selectivity for Fe<sup>3+</sup> with the limit of detection (LoD) of 3.18 nM. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations were performed to reveal the mechanism of excellent performance for Fe<sup>3+</sup> detection. Meanwhile, COOH-CDs showed no obvious effect on lactobacillus plantarum growth, which means that COOH-CDs have good biocompatibility. Due to the nontoxicity and excellent detection performance for Fe<sup>3+</sup>, COOH-CDs were employed as a fluorescent sensor toward LF and showed satisfying performance with an LoD of 0.776 µg/mL, which was better than those of the other methods.
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