Carbonized Polymer Dots Derived from the Maillard Reaction and Their Anti-Counterfeiting Application

Carbonized polymer dots (CPDs), a significant branch of carbon dots (CDs), have attracted considerable attention in fields such as biomedicine, sensing, optoelectronic devices and information encryption due to their excellent stability, tunable optical properties and good biocompatibility. The Maillard reaction, a pivotal step in food processing, involves the core mechanism wherein amino compounds and carbonyl compounds undergo condensation polymerization, carbonization and cross-linking reactions to form melanoidin polymers. This mechanism is highly compatible with the bottom-up synthesis method of CPDs. Therefore, in this study, CPDs were successfully synthesized using glucose and lysine as precursors based on the classic Maillard reaction. Subsequently, the CPDs@BA composite materials were constructed by complexing the CPDs with boric acid (BA). Furthermore, the synthesized CPDs@BA composite material was used in the field of anti-counterfeiting. These findings present a novel strategy for preparing CPDs through food-related reactions and investigate their potential for optical encryption applications.