A simple and rapid chemiluminescence aptasensor for acetamiprid in contaminated samples: Sensitivity, selectivity and mechanism

• A simple, rapid, sensitive and selective CL aptasensor for acetamiprid is achieved.
• The aptasensor is based on ABA recognition and AuNPs morphology effect on catalysis.
• The high specificity of ABA recognization led to this aptasensor's high selectivity.
• The sensitivity is due to AuNPs significant CL change from tiny morphology change.
• Acetamiprid detection in real environment and food samples exhibits good reliability.

Ultralow concentration and selective detection of pesticide residue is important to evaluate the environmental and biological pollution and the threat to human health which single component pesticide can bring. Herein, we report an amplified chemiluminescence (CL) sensing platform for ultrasensitive and selective acetamiprid (widely used pesticide) detection. It is based on aptamer's high binding affinity to target and the relevance between AuNPs' morphology and its catalytic effect to stimulate the generation of CL in the presence of H2O2 and luminol. Moreover, AuNPs morphological slight change induced by aptamers’ conformation during targets binding could lead to the significant change of catalytic properties. Therefore, the proposed sensing platform for pesticide residue exhibited a high sensitivity toward acetamiprid with a detection limit of 62 pM, which was about 100-fold lower than that of other aptamer-based sensor for acetamiprid detection. Because of the intrinsic specificity of aptamer's recognization, this sensing platform has high selectivity. So, this sensing platform provides a label-free and cost-effective approach for sensitive and selective detection of single component pesticide residue. More importantly, this CL method was successfully used to determine acetamiprid in real contaminated samples.