Tenacious copper nanoclusters shielded by aromatic thiol for use in antibacterial, bioimaging, and dye degradation applications

Aromatic thiol-protected copper nanoclusters (CuNCs) have emerged as promising catalysts for dye degradation due to their unique optical and catalytic properties. In this study, we effectively synthesized CuNCs less than 10 nm-sized, very stable particles. The absorption peaks confirms that metal-to-ligand charge transfer, which favors the binding interaction of the frontier molecular orbitals and shifts the absorption bands of the free ligand and the extremely small water-soluble CuNCs in a blue direction in a water medium. Studies using electron microscopy support the existence of the pure form of the crystal-like shape. HRTEM confirms the morphology and less than 10 nm, and SAED and XRD confirm the crystallinity. This study on CuNCs for methylene blue sensing was conducted here. The detection range for methylene blue rapid degradation was observed. For the antibacterial studies when compared to gram-negative (E.coli), the synthesized copper nanoclusters had a high contact, as shown by a maximum value of zone diameter of 20 mm at a fixed concentration of 100 µg. The resulted in tunable quantum yields of 6.8 % which helped enhance the MCF-7 cancer cell line bioimaging, with the cancer cell line a maximum of 93.39 % cell viability with a minimum concentration of CuNCs 10 nM.