Turn-on fluorescence detection of cysteine with glutathione protected silver nanoclusters

In this work, we report a sensitive and selective turn-on fluorescence detection of cysteine with glutathione protected silver nanoclusters (GSH-Ag NCs). The glutathione stabilized silver nanoclusters were synthesized by the boiling water method. When excited at 380 nm, the GSH-Ag NCs exhibited a weak emission at about 680 nm, which could be enhanced by cysteine. The proposed method allows evaluation of cysteine in the range of 2–3000 μM with a detection limit of 0.51 μM. The recoveries were found to be 95.07%-101.38% when detecting cysteine contents in fetal bovine serum samples. In addition, we also discussed the possible mechanism for the fluorescence enhancement of GSH-Ag NCs by addition of cysteine. It might be the formation of cysteine and glutathione co-capped Ag NCs. This work reported a fluorimetric method for the assay of cysteine and provided a strategy for the synthesis of dual ligand-protected Ag nanoclusters.