Abstract
Securing food safety standards is crucial to protect the population from health-threatening food contaminants. In the case of pesticide residues, reference procedures typically find less than 1% of tested samples being contaminated, thus indicating the necessity for new tools able to support smart and affordable prescreening. Here, we introduce a hybrid paper–lab-on-a-chip platform, which integrates on-demand injectors to perform multiple step protocols in a single disposable device. Simultaneous detection of enzymatic color response in sample and reference cells, using a regular smartphone, enabled semiquantitative detection of carbofuran, a neurotoxic and EU-banned carbamate pesticide, in a wide concentration range. The resulting evaluation procedure is generic and allows the rejection of spurious measurements based on their dynamic responses, and was effectively applied for the binary detection of carbofuran in apple extracts.
Highlights
Food safety plays a crucial role in detecting the presence of harmful substances, such as pesticide residues, which can severely harm consumers’ health
There is a demand for a more comprehensive complementary screening in order to protect the population from uncounted threats
To achieve a practical device configuration with potential for on-site use demands the integration of the paper assay into an autonomous LOC system able to support robust response evaluation [19]
Summary
Food safety plays a crucial role in detecting the presence of harmful substances, such as pesticide residues, which can severely harm consumers’ health. The platform is able to perform the complete protocol necessary for a robust detection with smartphone cameras, within predicted semiquantitative categories and with the ability to reject failed measurements
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