Naked eye sensors for on-site pesticide detection: a review

Contamination by pesticides is known to be one of the major issues that are enormously degrading the quality of food and fodder crops together with increased agricultural, en-vironmental and aquatic pollution. Many analytical and laboratory methods are available for detection of these pesticides in products in order to maintain food security but these methods are not readily accessible to most people including farmers for on-site and on -field detection in the crops. The development of more convenient, fast, and cost-effective methods that can be easily accessed by laymen based on simple paper strips or mobile ana-lyzers etc. are need of the time. This review includes a brief discussion about novel devices which have been introduced in the field for pesticide detection viz. easy to use colorimet-ric and non-colorimetric detection methods based on various electrochemical and optical sensing strategies. These techniques exhibited promising results in field of on-site pesticide detection owing to their easy production, high sensitivity and readily accessible results ob-tained with these portable devices. This review further describes emerging prospects, defi-cits and challenges associated with the application of the aforementioned sensing devices.