Rapid Detection of Tebuconazole Based on Aptasensor and Aggregation of Silver Nanoparticles

Abstract

Tebuconazole is a triazole fungicide used in agriculture to treat pathogenic fungi. It is listed as a possible carcinogen and it shows a potential risk for the environment at very low concentration. Therefore, the detection and monitoring of tebuconazole in food and environment play an important role. The current methods for the analysis of tebuconazole employ gas-liquid chromatography (GLC) and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) after sample extraction with organic solvents and column cleaning. Besides the advantages of these methods such as efficiency, repeatability, and accuracy, they are still time-consuming and costly. Herein, we report a simple, sensitive platform for the fast detection of pesticides with a low cost. The detection technique exploits a pesticide-specific DNA aptamer as the bioreceptor of an optical biosensor. Instead of trying to capture the pesticide on the sensor surface, our method allows the DNA aptamers, which are adsorbed on the nanoparticle’s surface, to detach from the nanoparticles when interacting with the pesticide. This leads to the pesticide-induced aggregation and the change of the absorption spectrum of metallic nanoparticles upon high-salt concentrations, which can be monitored with unaided eye or absorbance measurement. Using tebuconazole as a model analyte for detection of pesticide, the designed aptasensor showed a high sensitivity and selectivity with a detection limit of ~10 nM and reaction time within ~20 min. In the case of tebuconazole detection in spiked rice samples, the average recoveries were in the range of 89.90–110.86% with the relative standard deviations (RSD) of 3.11–4.32%. These results indicate that our sensing platform can be exploited for the rapid detection of pesticides in real samples.