Impact of Dual-Emissive Carbon Dots on Growth and Physiological Indexes of Cucumber Seedlings

An increase in photosynthetic efficiency can increase the production of fruits and vegetables. Due to many limitations, plants generally use much less photosynthetic capacity because they do not absorb all incoming sunlight. Plant nano-bionics investigates Carbon quantum dots (CDs) having the high light-harvesting capability, which could be used to improve the photosynthesis efficiency of plants. To increase the yield of cucumber, this paper studied the effects of different concentrations of CDs on the growth of cucumber seedlings. We synthesized and tested nontoxic dual-emissive CDs for the photosynthetic efficiency increase in cucumber seedlings. We found that the concentration of CDs (1500 mg/l) achieves the best growth promotion of cucumber seedlings. The contents of flavonoids, soluble sugars, carotenoids, and total chlorophyll in the treated cucumber seedlings increased by 19.90%, 26.78%, 117.77%, 81.65%, respectively. Meanwhile, we found that the leaf area, net photosynthetic rate, photosynthetic pigments, and photosynthetic parameters of cucumber seedlings were improved to a certain extent after treatment with an appropriate concentration of CDs. In summary, carbon quantum dots have strong application prospects in cucumber production.