Targeted On-Demand Screening of Pesticide Panel in Soil Runoff

Using pesticides is a common agricultural and horticultural practice to serve as a control against weeds, fungi, and insects in plant systems. The application of these chemical agents is usually by spraying them on the crop or plant. However, this methodology is not highly directional, and so only a fraction of the pesticide actually adsorbs onto the plant, and the rest seeps through into the soil base contaminating its composition and eventually leaching into groundwater sources. Electrochemical sensors which are more practical for in situ analysis used for pesticide detection in soil runoff systems are still in dearth, while the ones published in the literature are attributed with complex sensor modification/functionalization and preprocessing of samples. Hence, in this work, we present a highly intuitive electroanalytical sensor approach toward rapid (10 min), on-demand screening of commonly used pesticides—glyphosate and atrazine—in soil runoff. The proposed sensor functions based on the affinity biosensing mechanism driven via thiol cross-linker and antibody receptors that holistically behaves as a recognition immunoassay stack that is specific and sensitive to track test pesticide analytes. Then, this developed sensor is integrated further to create a pesticide-sensing ecosystem using a front-end field-deployable smart device. The method put forward in this work is compared and validated against a standard laboratory potentiostat instrument to determine efficacy, feasibility, and robustness for a point-of-use (PoU) setting yielding LoD levels of 0.001 ng/ml for atrazine and 1 ng/ml for glyphosate. Also, the ML model integration resulted in an accurate prediction rate of ≈80% in real soil samples. Therefore, a universal pesticide screening analytical device is designed, fabricated, and tested for pesticide assessment in real soil runoff samples.