Acetylcholinesterase inhibition-based biosensors for pesticide determination: A review

Pesticides released intentionally into the environment and through various processes contaminate the environment. Although pesticides are associated with many health hazards, there is a lack of monitoring of these contaminants. Traditional chromatographic methods—high-performance liquid chromatography, capillary electrophoresis, and mass spectrometry—are effective for the analysis of pesticides in the environment but have certain limitations such as complexity, time-consuming sample preparation, and the requirement of expensive apparatus and trained persons to operate. Over the past decades, acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibition-based biosensors have emerged as simple, rapid, and ultra-sensitive tools for pesticide analysis in environmental monitoring, food safety, and quality control. These biosensors have the potential to complement or replace the classical analytical methods by simplifying or eliminating sample preparation and making field-testing easier and faster with significant decrease in cost per analysis. This article reviews the recent developments in AChE inhibition-based biosensors, which include various immobilization methods, different strategies for biosensor construction, the advantages and roles of various matrices used, analytical performance, and application methods for constructing AChE biosensors. These AChE biosensors exhibited detection limits and linearity in the ranges of 1.0×10-11 to 42.19 μM (detection limits) and 1.0 × 10−11–1.0 × 10−2 to 74.5–9.9 × 103 μM (linearity). These biosensors were stable for a period of 2 to 120 days. The future prospects for the development of better AChE biosensing systems are also discussed.