Introduction

Pesticides have been one of the most controversial food

contaminants in history. When environmentalist Rachel Carsons book
Silent Spring was published in 1962, the public was informed of the
environmental and health concerns related to the aerial spraying of
dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, more popularly known as DDT. Various
food and food products from the United States, including kale and
carrots, were found to be heavily contaminated by DDT. To this date,
DDT is still known to bioaccumulate on food, specifically milk and
butter.
The awareness on the negative consequences of using pesticides
have developed interests in methods for detection and quantitation of
pesticide residues in the soil, water, crops, and food. Nowadays, the list
of chemical pesticides that intoxicate food products have increased,
some of them include Rotenone and Paraquat (Kaufman, 1996).
Methodology
DESK RESEARCH
RnD
Techniques in pesticide detection and quantitation include gas
chromatography, mass spectrophotometry, and high performance
liquid chromatography (Nishijima, 1995; Kaufman & Clower, 1991).
These techniques, however, require a large number of samples in order
to broaden the scope of analyses. Moreover, these instrumental
techniques require complex and costly equipment.
The use of immunoassay technology in pesticide detection has
been used in extensive researches (Kaufman & Clower, 1991), and
specific antibodies have been developed in order to recognize specific
pesticide antigens. Immunoassays may be direct competitive, in which
tracer-labelled antigen-antibody complexes of known amounts are
placed inside the well. Results may be identified based on the amount
of tracer available; this amount is inversely proportional to the amount
of analyte present in the sample.
On the other hand, the indirect competitive immunoassay, a
known amount of standard analyte is bound to a surface with a carrier
protein to facilitate the binding. The test sample then is mixed with the
specific antibody. The amount of antibody available to bind to the
analyte is limited to the analyte present in the test sample. The
antibody can be detected directly or through the specificity of a second
labeled anti-antibody. This type of immunoassay is more commonly

used for pesticide determination in food samples (Kaufman B. M.,

1996; Nishijima, 1995).
Paraquats and diquats are widely-used herbicides for weed and
grass control. Majority of the paraquat detection techniques have been
done for clinical applications, however there are studies in detection of
paraquats and diquats residues using the immunoassay technique in
soils, crops, and food. In 1985, Van Emon et al. have developed an
enzyme immunoassay for the detection of paraquat in milk, beef, and
potatoes at levels of 2.5ug/kg. The difference of this method to other
enzyme immunoassays was the extraction of material using 6M HCl.
Pyrethroids, which are derived from chrysanthemum, are also
considered as important insecticides due to to its effectiveness and
rapid decomposition. Pyrethroids are adapted from the chemical
structure of pyrethrin, modified in order to increase the stability under
high sunlight conditions (United States Environmental Protection
Agency, 2014). Similar to aforementioned DDT and paraquats,
pyrethroids have been found in trace amounts in food commodities
including banana, pineapples, and dried-oat food for infants (Jabr,
2010).
Pyrethroids have been detected using competitive
radioimmunoassay or RIA, in which the radioactivity is used to
determine and quantify pesticide residues in a given food sample. In
the study of Wing (1978), S-bioallethrins, the market-ready insecticidal
isomer of allethrin, were detected at concentrations in the 0.01nM
range.
Different pesticides have different immunoassays that can detect
and quantify the residue contents in food samples. Pyrethrin, for
example, is not limited to detection using RIA; monoclonal antibodybased competitive immunoassay and polyclonal antibody-based
immunoassay were reported to have been used by various researchers
(Hill et al., 1993). Assay kits, coming in different formats, for pesticide
detection have already been developed by several companies and
research groups.
References
Hill, A. S. et al. (1993). Quantitation of bioresmethrin, a synthetic
pyrethroid grain protectant, by enzyme immunoassay. Journal of
Agricultural and Food Chemistry , 41, 2011-2018.
Jabr, F. (2010, February 26). Derived from flowers, but not benign:
Pyrethroids raise new concerns. (E. H. Sciences, Producer)
Retrieved August 30, 2015, from Envirnmental Health News:
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/pyrethroidsraise-concerns

Kaufman, B. M. (1996). Applications of immunoassay to pesticide

analysis. In J. Gilbert (Ed.), Progress in Food Contaminant
Analysis. Boundary Row, London, United Kingdom: Balckie
Academic & Professional.
Kaufman, B. M., & Clower, M. J. (1991). Immunoassay of pesticides.
Journal of AOAC International , 74 (2), 239-47.
Nishijima, M. (1995). Enzyme immunoassays of pesticide residues in
foods. Nihon Rinsho , 53 (9), 2310-5.
Van Emon, J. M. (1985). Applications of immunoassay to paraquat and
other pesticides. Bioregulators for Pest Control. 276, pp. 307316. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society.
United States Environmental Protection Agency. (2014, August 6).
Pyrethroids and Pyrethrins. Retrieved August 30, 2015, from
Pesticides: Regulating Pesticides:
http://www.epa.gov/oppsrrd1/reevaluation/pyrethroidspyrethrins.html#risk
Wing, K. D. (1978). Development of an S-bioallethrin specific antibody.
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry , 26, 1328-1333.