Progress of Room Temperature Phosphorescent Sensing Application Based on Manganese-doped Zinc Sulfide Quantum Dots

In comparison with traditional organic dyes, semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) feature a series of superior luminescence properties, including narrow and symmetric emission, broad excitation and strong absorption, excellent photobleaching-resistance, and good water solubility. The addition of dopants can endows QDs with extra new properties, e.g., further increase the Stokes shift for avoiding self-quenching. Mn-doped ZnS QDs are a very representative example of doped QDs. No harmful elements such as Cd and Hg are involved in such type of bio-friendly QDs. Besides, the Mn2+ dopant further adds QDs with excellent room temperature phosphorescence. Phosphorescent detection can effectively eliminate the interference of biological background fluorescence, thus Mn-doped ZnS QDs can be widely used in phosphorescent bioanalysis. In this paper, the recent progress of room temperature phosphorescence analysis with Mn-doped ZnS QDs was reviewed. The emphasis was placed on the several stimulative sensing design strategies, including the luminescence mechanism, ion probes, detection of small molecules and biomacromolecules.