Abstract
Pesticides, due to their intensive use and their peculiar chemical features, can persist in the environment and enter the trophic chain, thus representing an environmental risk for the ecosystems and human health. Although there are several robust and reliable standard analytical techniques for their monitoring, the high frequency of contamination caused by pesticides requires methods for massive monitoring campaigns that are capable of rapidly detecting these compounds in many samples of different origin. Immunosensors represent a potential tool for simple, rapid, and sensitive monitoring of pesticides. Antibodies coupled to electrochemical or optical transducers have resulted in effective detection devices. In this review, the new trends in immunosensor development and the application of immunosensors for the detection of pesticides of environmental concern—such as glyphosate, organophosphates, and neonicotinoids—are described.
Highlights
Every year, millions of tons of pesticides are produced for agricultural purposes [1]
Pesticides can be classified according to their chemical structure [2,6], the associated toxicological risk [7], the persistence [8] or their toxicity according to their chemical structure, mechanism of action, and fate [9]
Glyphosate is involved in biochemical alterations of processes of microorganisms and plants, inhibiting the enzyme 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS) responsible for the biosynthesis of aromatic amino acids; the decrease of these amino acids in the organism reduces the synthesis of proteins causing the cessation of growth and the death [66]
Summary
Millions of tons of pesticides are produced for agricultural purposes [1]. Most of them are based on gas and liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (MS and tandem MS) [20,21] Using these techniques low detection limits can be achieved obtaining results with high selectivity and accuracy. This kind of analysis should be performed necessarily by well-trained personnel due to the laborious sample treatments [22,23] and the complex analytical procedures. Among the different types of biosensors for pesticide determination, immunosensors [29] have gained in popularity in the last decade [35,36,37,38] as rapid screening techniques because of specificity, sensitivity, low cost, and suitability for high throughput screening. Different optical and electrochemical immunoassay schemes currently reported for a selected number of pesticides (glyphosate, carbamate, organophosphate, and neonicotinoids) are reviewed, focusing on a literature survey of the last five years (2013–2018)
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