A portable detection method for organophosphorus and carbamates pesticide residues based on multilayer paper chip

Progress in environmental monitoring and mitigation strategies for herbicides and insecticides: A comprehensive review

Herbicides and insecticides are pervasively applied in agricultural sector to increase the yield by controlling or eliminating bug vermin and weeds. Although, resistance development occurs, direct and indirect impact on human health and ecosystem is clearly visible. Normally, herbicides and pesticides are water soluble in nature; accordingly, it is hard to decrease their deadliness and to dis-appear them from the environment. They are profoundly specific, and considered as poisonous to various peoples in agricultural and industrial work places. In order to substantially reduce the harmful impacts, it is crucial to thoroughly examine the detection and mitigation measures for these compounds. The primary objective of this paper is to provide an overview of various herbicide and pesticide detection techniques and associated remedial techniques. A short summary on occurrence and harmful effects of herbicides/insecticides on ecosystem has been included to the study. The conventional and advanced, rapid techniques for the detection of insecticides and herbicides were described in detail. A detailed overview on several mitigation strategies including advanced oxidation, adsorption, electrochemical process, and bioremediation as well as the mechanism behind the strategic approaches to reduce the effects of growing pesticide pollution has been emphasized. Regardless of the detection techniques and mitigation strategies, the recent advances employed, obstacles, and perspectives have been discussed in detail.

Microfluidic advances in food safety control

Food contamination is a global concern, particularly in developing countries. Two main types of food contaminants-chemical and biological-are common problems that threaten human health. Therefore, rapid and accurate detection methods are required to address the threat of food contamination. Conventional methods employed to detect these two types of food contaminants have several limitations, including high costs and long analysis time. Alternatively, microfluidic technology, which allows for simple, rapid, and on-site testing, can enable us to control food safety in a timely, cost-effective, simple, and accurate manner. This review summarizes advances in microfluidic approaches to detect contaminants in food. Different detection methods have been applied to microfluidic platforms to identify two main types of contaminants: chemical and biological. For chemical contaminant control, the application of microfluidic approaches for detecting heavy metals, pesticides, antibiotic residues, and other contaminants in food samples is reviewed. Different methods including enzymatic, chemical-based, immunoassay-based, molecular-based, and electrochemical methods for chemical contaminant detection are discussed based on their working principle, the integration in microfluidic platforms, advantages, and limitations. Microfluidic approaches for foodborne pathogen detection, from sample preparation to final detection, are reviewed to identify foodborne pathogens. Common methods for foodborne pathogens screening, namely immunoassay, nucleic acid amplification methods, and other methods are listed and discussed; highlighted examples of recent studies are also reviewed. Challenges and future trends that could be employed in microfluidic design and fabrication process to address the existing limitations for food safety control are also covered. Microfluidic technology is a promising tool for food safety control with high efficiency and applicability. Miniaturization, portability, low cost, and samples and reagents saving make microfluidic devices an ideal choice for on-site detection, especially in low-resource areas. Despite many advantages of microfluidic technology, the wide manufacturing of microfluidic devices still demands intensive studies to be conducted for user-friendly and accurate food safety control. Introduction of recent advances of microfluidic devices will build a comprehensive understanding of the technology and offer comparative analysis for future studies and on-site application.

Paper-Based Microfluidic Chips for Food Hazard Factor Detection: Fabrication, Modification, and Application

Food safety and quality are paramount concerns for ensuring the preservation of human life and well-being. As the field of food processing continues to advance, there is a growing interest in the development of fast, instant, cost-effective, and convenient methods for detecting food safety issues. In this context, the utilization of paper-based microfluidic chips has emerged as a promising platform for enabling rapid detection, owing to their compact size, high throughput capabilities, affordability, and low resource consumption, among other advantages. To shed light on this topic, this review article focuses on the functionalization of paper-based microfluidic surfaces and provides an overview of the latest research and applications to colorimetric analysis, fluorescence analysis, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, as well as their integration with paper-based microfluidic platforms for achieving swift and reliable food safety detection. Lastly, the article deliberates on the challenges these analytical methods and presents insights into their future development prospects in facilitating rapid food safety assessment.

The application of rapid test paper technology for pesticide detection in horticulture crops: a comprehensive review

Background

The ever increasing pests and diseases occurring during vegetable crop production is a challenge for agronomists and farmers. One of the practices to avoid or control the attack of the causal agents is the use of pesticides, including herbicides, insecticides nematicides, and molluscicides. However, the use of these products can result in the presence of harmful residues in horticultural crops, which cause several human diseases such as weakened immunity, splenomegaly, renal failure, hepatitis, respiratory diseases, and cancer. Therefore, it was necessary to find safe and effective techniques to detect these residues in horticultural crops and to monitor food security.

Main body

The review discusses the use of conventional methods to detect pesticide residues on horticultural crops, explain the sensitivity of nanoparticle markers to detect a variety of pesticides, discuss the different methods of rapid test paper technology and highlight recent research on rapid test paper detection of pesticides.

Conclusions

The methodologies discussed in the current review can be used in a certain situation, and the variety of methods enable detection of different types of pesticides in the environment. Notably, the highly sensitive immunoassay, which offers the advantages of being low cost, highly specific and sensitive, allows it to be integrated into many detection fields to accurately detect pesticides.

Rapid determination of lambda-cyhalothrin residues on Chinese cabbage based on MIR spectroscopy and a Gustafson–Kessel noise clustering algorithm

Pesticide residues exceeding the standard in Chinese cabbage is harmful to human health. In order to quickly, non-destructively and effectively qualitatively analyze lambda-cyhalothrin residues on Chinese cabbage, a method involving a Gustafson–Kessel noise clustering (GKNC) algorithm was proposed to cluster the mid-infrared (MIR) spectra. A total of 120 Chinese cabbage samples with three different lambda-cyhalothrin residue levels (no lambda-cyhalothrin, and cases where the ratios of lambda-cyhalothrin and water were 1 : 500 and 1 : 100) were scanned using an Agilent Cary 630 FTIR spectrometer for collecting the MIR spectra. Next, multiple scatter correction (MSC) was employed to eliminate the effects of light scattering. Furthermore, principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) were utilized to reduce the dimensionality and extract the feature information from the MIR spectra. Finally, fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering, Gustafson–Kessel (GK) clustering, noise clustering (NC) and the GKNC algorithm were applied to cluster the MIR spectral data, respectively. The experimental results showed that the GKNC algorithm gave the best classification performance compared against the other three fuzzy clustering algorithms, and its highest clustering accuracy reached 93.3%. Therefore, the GKNC algorithm coupled with MIR spectroscopy is an effective method for detecting lambda-cyhalothrin residues on Chinese cabbage.

Pesticide residues exceeding the standard in Chinese cabbage is harmful to human health.

Rational hapten design to produce high-quality antibodies against carbamate pesticides and development of immunochromatographic assays for simultaneous pesticide screening

Carbamate pesticides (CPs) are the most used pesticides in agricultural production and pest control. In this study, carbofuran, isoprocarb and carbaryl were employed as models, and a general hapten strategy based on carbamate moiety recognition was proposed. Molecular modeling of the three-dimensional (3D) structure and surface electrostatic potential of the CPs indicated that the amide group formed by conjugation significantly influenced recognition by antibodies. The proposed strategy was used to obtain three sensitive and specific monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) with IC₅₀ values of 1.4 ng/mL, 8.4 ng/mL and 13.8 ng/mL for carbofuran, isoprocarb and carbaryl, respectively. Negligible cross-reactivity (%) with analogs was observed, except for fenobucarb (84.6%) for isoprocarb. The obtained antibodies were used to develop an immunochromatographic assay (ICA) to simultaneously and quantitatively detect the three CPs. A strip reader was used to determine the limits of quantitation (LOQs) as 0.05 ng/mL (carbofuran), 31.3 ng/mL (isoprocarb) and 31.3 ng/mL (carbaryl). The recoveries of cucumber and Chinese cabbage samples ranged from 76% to 111%, with CVs from 1.3% to 10.6%, indicating good potential for the rapid simultaneous detection of multiple pesticide residues in a large batch of samples.

Bioactive microfluidic paper device for pesticide determination in waters

This work presents a new optical microfluidic paper biosensor for the detection of organophosphate pesticides and carbamate pesticides. The assay strip is composed of a paper support (1 × 17.6 mm) onto which acetylcholine esterase (AChE) and acetylcholine chloride (AChCl) are deposited, in such a way that there is a small hole between them that ensures that they only come into contact in the reaction zone when they are carried by a solution of the sample by lateral flow to the reaction zone containing bromocresol purple (BCP) as the pH indicator, immobilized by sol-gel. The sensor operates at room temperature and the rate of the inhibited reaction serves as an analytical signal, which is measured using a camera by quantifying the appropriate colour coordinate. Calibration curves were obtained for chlorpyrifos and carbaryl, with a useful concentration range from 0.24 to 20 μg L^-1 for carbaryl and from 2.00 to 45 μg L^-1 for chlorpyrifos. The detection limits were 0.24 and 2.00 μg L^-1, respectively, and with reproducibility around 4.2-5.5%. The method was applied to the determination of pesticides in different water samples, with no sample preparation.

Application of Microfluidic Chip Technology in Food Safety Sensing

Food safety analysis is an important procedure to control food contamination and supervision. It is urgently needed to construct effective methods for on-site, fast, accurate and popular food safety sensing. Among them, microfluidic chip technology exhibits distinguish advantages in detection, including less sample consumption, fast detection, simple operation, multi-functional integration, small size, multiplex detection and portability. In this review, we introduce the classification, material, processing and application of the microfluidic chip in food safety sensing, in order to provide a good guide for food safety monitoring.

Two-Dimensional Hole-Array Grating-Coupling-Based Excitation of Bloch Surface Waves for Highly Sensitive Biosensing

In this study, a surface diffraction two-dimensional (2D) grating structure was placed on the topmost layer of distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs) for biosensing. Bloch surface wave (BSW) resonance was realized by coupling a 2D subwavelength hole-array grating and could be excited at different locations: the surface of 2D-grating layer or the inter-face between the DBR and bio-solution. Material losses in the multilayer dielectric were measured to test the robustness of this scheme. Both the surface diffraction-grating BSW (DG-BSW) and the alternative guided grating-coupled BSW (GC-BSW) configuration showed markedly enhanced angular sensitivity compared to conventional prism-coupled schematics. Exciting these modes using a grating-coupling technique appears to yield different extreme sensitivity modes with a maximum of 1190°/RIU for DG-BSW and 2255°/RIU for GC-BSW. Refractive index sensors with a high figure of merit may be realized via such compact configurations.

A review on microfluidics in the detection of food pesticide residues

This paper briefly explains the food safety problems related to pesticide residues and introduces microfluidics technology as a pesticide residue detection method. Three mainstream microfluidic detection devices are detailed: one driven by liquid surface tension, one by motor siphon drive, and one by centrifugal force. The advantages and disadvantages of each are considered in an analysis of future trends in microfluidic technology for pesticide detection.

Pesticide Residues Identification by Optical Spectrum in the Time-Sequence of Enzyme Inhibitors Performed on Microfluidic Paper-Based Analytical Devices (µPADs)

Pesticides vary in the level of poisonousness, while a conventional rapid test card only provides a general “absence or not” solution, which cannot identify the various genera of pesticides. In order to solve this problem, we proposed a seven-layer paper-based microfluidic chip, integrating the enzyme acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and chromogenic reaction. It enables on-chip pesticide identification via a reflected light intensity spectrum in time-sequence according to the different reaction efficiencies of pesticide molecules and assures the optimum temperature for enzyme activity. After pretreatment of figures of reflected light intensity during the 15 min period, the figures mainly focused on the reflected light variations aroused by the enzyme inhibition assay, and thus, the linear discriminant analysis showed satisfying discrimination of imidacloprid (Y = −1.6525X − 139.7500), phorate (Y = −3.9689X − 483.0526), and avermectin (Y = −2.3617X − 28.3082). The correlation coefficients for these linearity curves were 0.9635, 0.8093, and 0.9094, respectively, with a 95% limit of agreement. Then, the avermectin class chemicals and real-world samples (i.e., lettuce and rice) were tested, which all showed feasible graphic results to distinguish all the chemicals. Therefore, it is feasible to distinguish the three tested kinds of pesticides by the changes in the reflected light spectrum in each min (15 min) via the proposed chip with a high level of automation and integration.