Abstract
Acetylcholinesterase (AChE) is an important cholinesterase enzyme present in the synaptic clefts of living organisms. It maintains the levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine by catalyzing the hydrolysis reaction of acetylcholine to thiocholine. This catalytic activity of AChE is drastically inhibited by trace amounts of organophosphorus (OP) pesticides present in the environment. As a result, effective monitoring of OP pesticides in the environment is very desirable and has been done successfully in recent years with the use of nanomaterial-based AChE sensors. In such sensors, the enzyme AChE has been immobilized onto nanomaterials like multiwalled carbon nanotubes, gold nanoparticles, zirconia nanoparticles, cadmium sulphide nano particles or quantum dots. These nanomaterial matrices promote significant enhancements of OP pesticide determinations, with the thiocholine oxidation occurring at much lower oxidation potentials. Moreover, nanomaterial-based AChE sensors with rapid response, increased operational and long storage stability are extremely well suited for OP pesticide determination over a wide concentration range. In this review, the unique advantages of using nanomaterials as AChE immobilization matrices are discussed. Further, detection limits, sensitivities and correlation coefficients obtained using various electroanalytical techniques have also been compared with chromatographic techniques.
Highlights
Acetylcholinesterase (AChE) is an important enzyme present in the synaptic clefts of the central nervous system of living organisms [1]
Amperometric studies reveal that the AChE/QCdS-PVP/glassy carbon electrode (GCE) sensor showed a good response to the added acetylthiocholine chloride in the linear range 2.0 x 10-5 M to 7.0 x 10-4 M
With the excessive use of unwanted amounts of pesticides the risks of human health care and the environment have risen to critical levels
Summary
Acetylcholinesterase (AChE) is an important enzyme present in the synaptic clefts of the central nervous system of living organisms [1]. Electrochemical enzyme sensors with high sensitivity, long term stability and low cost detection of specific biological binding events have extensively reduced sampling and testing times in pesticide determinations [6]. Such sensors produced precise results under all field conditions. AChE has been immobilized onto various nanomaterial surfaces in order to improve the response and stability in trace pesticide detection These nanomaterial matrices include carbon nanotubes (CNTs) [10,11,12,13,14,15], gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), etc [16,17,18,19,20]. Nanomaterials based sensors, we have compared their characteristic features with the complex chromatographic techniques
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