Bio-sensing of organophosphorus pesticides: A review

Abstract Organophosphorus (OP) pesticides have been used widely as agricultural and household pest control agents for almost five decades and persist in our water resources, fruits, vegetables and processed food as health and environmental hazardous compounds. Thus, detection of these harmful OP pesticides at an ease with high sensitivity and selectivity is the need of hour. Bio-sensing technology meet these requirements and has been employed at a large scale for detection. The present review is aimed mainly to provide the overview of the past and recent advances occurred in the field of biosensor technology employed for the detection of these OP compounds. The review describes the principle and strategy of various OP biosensors including electrochemical (amperometric, potentiometric), thermal, piezoelectric, optical (fluorescence, Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR)), microbial and DNA biosensors in detail. The electrochemical biosensors are generally, based on inhibition of enzyme, acetyl cholinesterase (AChE), butyryl cholinesterase (BChE), tyrosinase and alkaline phosphatase or enzyme (organophosphorus hydrolase, OPH)) catalyzed reaction. The detection limits and linearity range of various OP biosensors have also been compared. AChE inhibition based amperometric OP biosensors exhibited the lowest detection limit of 1 × 10 −11  μM with a linearity range of 1.0 × 10 −11 – 1.0 × 10 −2  μM.