RESEARCH PROFILE: Pesticide monitoring with a quartz crystal microbalance

摘要

Pesticides in drinking water are never a good thing. To help combat this problem, Xinyan Bi and Kun-Lin Yang of the National University of Singapore have developed a new sensor that can continuously monitor a city's water supply for two pesticides, imidacloprid and thiacloprid. Their work is described in a new AC paper (DOI 10.1021/ac801786a). The new device is based on a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) transducer coupled to a 2D molecular imprinted monolayer (MIM). The sensor can discriminate between the two structurally related neonicotinoid molecules at levels below minimal European Union (EU) food-safety standards, even within a complex background matrix. (Because Singapore does not have its own standard for these two pesticides, Yang opted to follow the EU standard for the purposes of this study.)