Executive Summary : | The use of pesticides has brought several benefits to mankind in various agricultural, industrial, and health areas. Despite the numerous benefits conferred by pesticides, their extensive use is considered as a major public health issue. Various human ailments such as malignant, neurodegenerative, reproductive, developmental, respiratory, and metabolic diseases continue to prevail as a consequence of their widespread usage and chronic exposure. Farmers and agricultural workers, indigenous communities, pregnant women, and children are particularly vulnerable to hazardous pesticide exposure and require special protection. The Special Rapporteurs from the UN in a press release in Geneva in 2017, pointed to research showing pesticides being responsible for approximately 200,000 acute-poisoning deaths each year. The overwhelming number of fatalities is majorly recorded in those developing countries where health, safety, and environmental regulations are miserable. The UN experts have even urged for a new treaty for the regulation and phase-out of the use of dangerous pesticides considering these agrochemicals as a “global human-rights concern. In compliance with the global-health and environmental-safety concern, the development of rapid and low-cost pesticide-detection techniques with enhanced sensitivity and specificity has become the need of the hour. The conventional methods of pesticide analysis include analytical techniques like gas chromatography (GC), liquid chromatography (LC), and mass spectrometry (MS). Although these techniques are fairly sensitive, however, they are usually time-consuming and need cumbersome and sophisticated instrumentation along with labor-intensive pre-treatment of samples. In addition, several immunoassays and enzyme-based methods such as enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) have also been explored where high specificity and sensitivity are achieved. However, generation of antibodies, their poor chemical/physical stability, and long-duration analysis make them unsuitable for on-site monitoring of pesticides. In view of the pressing need to detect the highly toxic pesticides and inherent drawbacks of the traditional methods, the proposal aims to develop a rapid easy-to-operate color-shift-based point-of-contact device employing an aptamer-based biosensor that shall offer highly-sensitive monitoring of pesticide residues.
The proposed study involves the development of a reliable potential nanobioprobe comprising an aptamer conjugated with a nanoparticle, and its employment in the invention of a point-of-contact device based on a lateral flow concept for rapid and on-site monitoring of pesticide residues in real environmental samples. The device thus developed will provide easy operational procedures and results will be visible by the naked eye in less than15 minutes at a low cost. |