Cheap and environment friendly nanosensors can quickly detect pesticides in contemporary orange juice

Karolinska Institutet researchers Georgios Sotiriou and Haipeng Li on the Division of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology have developed an affordable, quick, and reproducible nanosensor for meals security diagnostics. A brand new research within the Chemical Engineering Journal exhibits that the sensors can detect pesticides in contemporary orange juice.

The research makes use of flame nanoparticle deposition to drastically decrease manufacturing prices. These high-performance optical sensors could be fabricated at a laboratory manufacturing charge of 100 samples/hour, demonstrating the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the aerosol manufacturing technique democratizing these sensors for sensible functions.

“The abuse of pesticides in trendy agriculture causes meals security and human well being considerations, that are highlighted by the World Well being Group. Because of this, to keep away from any dangers to human well being, it’s crucial to regulate the pesticide residue ranges in meals under security limits.

“Whereas SERS is highly effective for quick and facile detection of pesticide residues in meals merchandise, its sensible software remains to be restricted by the excessive expense, low scalability, and low reproducibility of the required sensors. To deal with this problem, we explored right here a low-cost, huge, and extremely reproducible nanofabrication route for manufacturing SERS nano-plasmonic optical sensors,” Georgios Sotiriou says.

“We used a course of well-known for its scalability and reproducibility, flame aerosol expertise, to design and develop our sturdy nano-plasmonic optical sensors. We studied the floor uniformity, restrict of detection, long-term stability, spot-to-spot reproducibility, sample-to-sample reproducibility, and batch-to-batch reproducibility of the fabricated SERS sensors.

“As well as, we benchmarked the efficiency of our SERS sensors towards a number of state-of-the-art commercially obtainable merchandise and demonstrated their feasibility in a sensible and sensible software by detecting pesticide residues in fruit juices,” says Haipeng Li.

The staff is now planning to extend the scalability of the fabrication course of, aiming to supply inexpensive sensors for the market.

“We will even increase the applying of our nano-sensors from detecting single pesticides to the blended pesticides, i.e., to detect the ‘cocktail impact of pesticides‘ (a mixture of a number of chemical substances might change into extra poisonous) which are pressing for meals security within the EU. We’re open to worldwide collaborations, which can velocity up the combination of scientific work from the laboratory to society,” Georgios Sotiriou says.