Love Mode Surface Acoustic Wave and High Fundamental Frequency Quartz Crystal Microbalance Immunosensors for the Detection of Carbaryl Pesticide

Abstract

In this work we determined the Sensitivity (estimated as the I50 value) and Limit of Detection (LOD) for the immunodetection of carbaryl pesticide with two different types of acoustic wave sensors: High Fundamental Frequency Quartz Crystal Microbalance (HFF-QCM) and Love Mode Surface Acoustic Wave (LM-SAW). Results were compared with others previously reported using different sensors and techniques, like traditional QCM, Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) and Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay (ELISA). We used the AWS-A10 research platform (AWSensors, Spain) to perform the experiments. We obtained I50 values of 0.31μg/L and 0.66μg/L, and LODs of 0.09μg/L and 0.14μg/L, for 120MHz LM-SAW and 100MHz HFF-QCM devices, respectively. Both the sensitivities and LODs of the immunosensors improved previously reported SPR and QCM results by one and two orders of magnitude, respectively, and reached those of ELISA.