Executive Summary : | The project proposes to address the grave threats posed to humans and the environment on a vast scale due to exposure to dangerous pesticides. Residual amounts of pesticides have been found everywhere as they get leached out to water bodies and on the surfaces and inside the food products as well. Ensuring the use of pesticides below the recommended levels is a major challenge to be tackled by the scientific community. To do so one has to develop methods for rapid testing and data monitoring so that policy decisions can be made. Conventional equipment working on GC-MS and LC-MS/MS does offer excellent determination of pesticides up to ppb but, due to complex analysis and high cost it is impossible to address the challenge in a real sense. Some work has been done in electrochemical sensing to develop bulk sensors. Most of the electrochemical sensors for pesticide determination are based on enzymes, aptamers, or immunosensors. However, there are a few challenges that remain pertinent such as the lifetime and stability of a sensor. Also, biofouling is a major challenge when it comes to real sample sensing. Although portable potentiostats have been attempted yet they are costly and cannot be used in remote areas. Thus, colorimetric analysis of the pesticide offers a way to develop low-cost and reliable devices for point of care applications. The project intends to exploit the agglomeration and dissolution properties of the surface-functionalized noble metal nanomaterials to estimate the concentration of the pesticide in food and environmental samples. The color of the solution changes in the presence of the pesticide and this change will be quantified by employing optoelectronic specific components such as LED and Photodiode. Beer and Lambert’s law will be put into the application which will correlate the absorption of the light from the quasi-monochromatic light source in the solution in which the pesticide is being measured. The low-cost and low-power sensor will give a voltage output for different concentrations of pesticide and then integrated IoT and Bluetooth along with smartphones will provide functionalities such as data monitoring, control, geotagging, etc. The ultraportable device owing to its high reliability at low cost and minimal power consumption has the potential to provide technological penetration to remote areas as well. Such devices can not only help with pesticide determination in vast areas but the reliable data collected from them can be used for high-level surveys which can lay models for accurate predictions to pave way for smart agriculture and boost efforts for environment conservation as well. |
Co-PI: | Dr. Sanket Goel, Birla Institute Of Technology & Science Pilani (BITS), Hyderabad Campus, Telangana-500078, Dr. Arshad Javed, Birla Institute Of Technology & Science Pilani (BITS), Hyderabad Campus, Telangana-500078 |