The commonly used approach for the detection of glucose is based on electrochemistry or enzyme assay. In this article, a novel invasive sensing method with convenient synthesis steps has been provided. This study reports an efficient sol-gel method to assemble hybrid organic-inorganic terbium nanocrystals. These particles with an average size of 40 nm are achieved at low temperature. The organic moiety possesses the carboxyl unit as the binding group to participate the coordination with terbium ions. Interestingly, the incorporated 2-carboxyphenylboronic acid can be able to chelate with diols units in glucose and the possible boronate cyclic ester formation reaction induces a strong quenching of green luminescence within a concentration range from 10 to 130 mu mol/L with a detection limit of 3.4 mu mol/L. The effectiveness of this way will open up new perspectives for the preparation of responsive photonic devices at nanometer scale.