Achievements and New Frontiers in Pesticide Sensing

About this Research Topic

Background

Pesticides are primarily used to prevent, control, or eliminate pests and weeds for boosting agricultural productivity in modern agricultural practices. However, the residue of pesticides even at trace levels not only seriously causes food contamination, but also severe breakdowns to the ecosystem, posing a great danger to daily life. Although most pesticides are detected to be within recommended limits, the bioaccumulation effect and continuous exposure can still pose safety risks to human health. In addition, some new types of highly effective pesticides, whose toxic mechanisms are not yet clearly understood, are being continuously brought into the market. Therefore, the analysis of pesticide residues is an urgent demand to ensure food quality and safety, safeguard the ecosystem, and protect human health from possible hazards.

Pesticide pollution has attracted increasing attention and has become one of the most alarming challenges in recent years. Sensors for pesticides with high sensitivity are urgently required to control food safety, protect the ecosystem, and prevent diseases. Most such sensors are still at laboratory level of testing and verifying proof-of-concept, and have not been incorporated in practical applications. Great research efforts have taken place in recent years in order to develop efficient sensing systems for accurate detection of pesticides in a facile, speedy, sensitive, selective, accurate and user-friendly manner. In improving the performance of sensors, recognition elements, such as enzymes, antibodies, molecularly-imprinted polymers, and aptamers, are required, as well as, advanced signal amplification strategies. By taking advantage of miniaturized devices and wireless networking, the recognition of pesticides can be transformed into a measurable digital signal by hand-held devices, such as smartphones, followed by delivering the detection results to the servers. These efforts will be the focus of the current Research Topic.

This Research Topic will cover new advances in the development of optical and electrochemical sensors for accurate monitoring of pesticides. Original research or review articles dealing with pesticide detection are welcome, including, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Construction of novel optical platform for the detection of pesticides (fluorescence, colorimetric and surface enhanced Raman scattering, surface plasmon resonance, chemiluminescent strategies and so on)
• Design of electrochemical sensors, including electrochemical, electrochemiluminescence and photoelectrochemical strategies.
• Development new recognition elements (nanozymes, molecularly imprinted polymers, aptamer, nanobodies, peptides, etc.)
• Applications of functional materials (0 to 3 dimensional materials) to pesticide sensing
• Field-deployable devices or hand-held devices for on-site monitoring of pesticides.

Keywords: Pesticides, Optical sensor, Electrochemical sensor, Recognition unit, Trace analysis

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