Firefly-mimicking intensive and long-lasting chemiluminescence hydrogels

Abstract

Most known chemiluminescence (CL) reactions exhibit flash-type light emission. Great efforts have been devoted to the development of CL systems that emit light with high intensity and long-lasting time. However, a long-lasting CL system that can last for hundreds of hours is yet-to-be-demonstrated. Here we show firefly-mimicking intensive and long-lasting CL hydrogels consisting of chitosan, CL reagent N-(4-aminobutyl)-N-ethylisoluminol (ABEI) and catalyst Co²⁺. The light emission is even visible to naked eyes and lasts for over 150 h when the hydrogels are mixed with H₂O₂. This is attributed to slow-diffusion-controlled heterogeneous catalysis. Co²⁺ located at the skeleton of the hydrogels as an active site catalyzes the decomposition of slowly diffusing H₂O₂, followed by the reaction with ABEI to generate intensive and long-lasting CL. This mimics firefly bioluminescence system in terms of intensity, duration time and catalytic characteristic, which is of potential applications in cold light sources, bioassays, biosensors and biological imaging.