Food safety and water contamination that are caused by the intensive use of pesticides in agriculture remain concerns worldwide. To ensure the safety of food products and reduce health risks, pesticides are routinely monitored in food and water. However, current technologies for the detection of pesticides are generally centralized, complicated, laborious, time-consuming, and costly. There is a need for simple, rapid, selective, and sensitive detection tools for on-site and on-line monitoring of pesticides in food and water. Such tools will enable inspectors and customers rapid screening of pesticides in minutes. This SBIR phase I project is to develop a novel paper/nanotechnology-based bioanalytical system to satisfy this need by enabling onsite detection of pesticide residues in food and water approximately five minutes. Such a system takes advantage of paper fluidics and a new nanocomposite material that will be integrated to achieve simple, rapid, and sensitive detection of pesticides. Furthermore, the system will incorporate wireless technology to connect to a smartphone that can efficiently record, manage, track, transfer, and share the data and enable the remote monitoring of pesticides and particularly benefit people in the resource-limited settings and less developed regions. This phase I project will develop and evaluate this system using six model organophosphate and carbamate pesticides spiked in water, and validate the system using real food and water samples. The goal of this phase I research is to determine the analytical performance of this system and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method for rapid and sensitive monitoring of pesticides in food and water.
