A Cost-Effective Nonenzymatic Electrochemical Multiplex Aptasensor Platform for On-Site Pesticide Detection

Multiple pesticide monitoring is crucial due to the widespread environmental contamination affecting ecosystems and human health. In recent years, reported electrochemical sensors face challenges in the fabrication of complex nanomaterial-based sensors for diverse pesticide detection due to reproducibility issues. This study for the first time introduces a novel multiplex fluidics-integrated electrochemical aptasensor, capable of detecting four most used hazardous pesticides, namely glyphosate, acetamiprid, malathion, and fipronil, simultaneously from three different classes, without any intricate material modification. In this work, the sensor leveraged thiolated aptamers and in-house low-cost fluidics-integrated gold-sputtered electrodes (∼$ 0.32). The aptasensor demonstrates picomolar limits of detection (1.48 pM, 1.58 pM, 1.17 pM, and 1.59 pM, respectively, for glyphosate, acetamiprid, malathion, and fipronil) with a wide detection range of 10 pM–10 μM capable of meeting the stringent requirements typically observed in environmental sample analysis. Also, this aptasensor showed promising reproducibility (relative standard deviation <3%) and reliable performance in agricultural runoff water, soil, and vegetables from farming fields (average relative error of 0.12 compared with high-performance liquid chromatography). Hence, the proposed multiplexed aptasensor facilitates the cost-effective feasibility of real-time multipesticide analysis in a single assay, making it a valuable tool for protecting environmental and human health.