Among the various carbon nanostructures, the graphene quantum dots represent an emerging 0D platform with very interesting properties for biological application. More specifically they are properly water-soluble, they can be decorated exploiting different chemical approaches and they possess intrinsic characteristics of fluorescence.

Herein, we report a new top-down strategy to prepare these structures, that has been recently explored and allows an almost quantitative conversion of the carbon source, and some preliminary biological results.