For practical application, it is highly desirable to obtain carbon dots (CDs) through environmentally benign synthetic route, using green raw materials. On the other hand, at present, most of CDs reported in the literature showed blue, green and yellow emission. Therefore it is still necessary to develop new strategy to obtain CDs with longer wavelength emission in order to expand their application range. Toward this end, in this study, N, S co-doped CDs were synthesized through one-pot condensation polymerization and carbonization reactions under hydrothermal conditions, using two different amino acids as raw materials. Taking the reaction of L-serine with L-cystine as an example, the as-obtained products were characterized by various techniques such as transmission electron microscopy, elemental analysis, Fourier-transform infrared spectrum, X-ray photoelectron spectra, and so on. Interestingly, N, S co-doped CDs displayed unique orange emission at room temperature. The possible photoluminescence mechanism of N, S co-doped CDs was proposed. Furthermore, the as-synthesized N, S co-doped CDs were directly applied in the imaging of peritoneal macrophages of mice. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.