Waiter! There are pesticides in my soup!

Canadian scientists from McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario), working under the leadership of John Brennan, have developed inexpensive paper test strips that allow detecting even small concentrations of pesticides in food and beverages in less than five minutes. The new tests, the results of which are easy to read by changing the color of the strips, are much more practical than traditional methods of identifying pesticides.

When conducting laboratory experiments using samples of food and beverages intentionally contaminated with widely used pesticides, the test strips effectively detected even very minor impurities of toxins within a few minutes.

In the future, such strips can be used to detect toxins in food and beverages.

In the article "Reagentless Bidirectional Lateral Flow Bioactive Paper Sensors for Detection of Pesticides in Beverage and Food Samples", published in the November issue of the journal Analytical Chemistry, the authors note that conducting traditional tests to detect pesticides that require expensive and complex equipment in some cases takes several hours, whereas in modern life it is constantly there is a growing need for inexpensive and easy-to-use tests for the content of pesticides. This issue is most important for the food industry, especially in developing countries, as well as for remote regions that do not have access to expensive laboratory equipment or suffer from a shortage of electricity.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on the materials of the American Chemical Society: Inexpensive 'dipstick' tests for pesticides in foods.

16.11.2009