Innovative biosensors for pre-screening of pesticide residues in water samples to support laboratory analyses

Biosensor technology has been an attractive field of study for more than 20 years. According to the properties exhibited by the biologic materials used as biomediators, such as electron transfer or fluorescence emission, different analytical technologies can be implemented. The biosensing instruments reported here are based on amperometric and optical mechanisms to read-out an electric current and a luminescence/fluorescence variation when the biomolecules react with a pesticide in the sample solution. Atrazine, diuron, linuron, terbuthylazine have been detected down to a concentration of 10-8M by the use of photosynthetic protein complexes extracted from algae and higher plants which contain a specific binding site of the herbicide. Exploiting biosensors the high number of samples reaching laboratories every day for HPLC and GC/MS analyses can be restricted to the positive samples, while negative ones can be directly discarded saving professionals' work and analysis cost and time.