A three-dimensional gold nanoparticles spherical liquid array for SERS sensitive detection of pesticide residues in apple

Qingyi Wei; Chaoying Pan; Tengfei Wang; Hongbin Pu; Da-Wen Sun

doi:10.1016/j.saa.2023.123357

A three-dimensional gold nanoparticles spherical liquid array for SERS sensitive detection of pesticide residues in apple

Spectrochim Acta A Mol Biomol Spectrosc. 2024 Jan 5:304:123357. doi: 10.1016/j.saa.2023.123357. Epub 2023 Sep 9.

Authors

Qingyi Wei¹, Chaoying Pan¹, Tengfei Wang¹, Hongbin Pu¹, Da-Wen Sun²

Affiliations

¹ School of Food Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641, China; Academy of Contemporary Food Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Center, Guangzhou 510006, China; Engineering and Technological Research Centre of Guangdong Province on Intelligent Sensing and Process Control of Cold Chain Foods, & Guangdong Province Engineering Laboratory for Intelligent Cold Chain Logistics Equipment for Agricultural Products, Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Centre, Guangzhou 510006, China.
² School of Food Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641, China; Academy of Contemporary Food Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Center, Guangzhou 510006, China; Engineering and Technological Research Centre of Guangdong Province on Intelligent Sensing and Process Control of Cold Chain Foods, & Guangdong Province Engineering Laboratory for Intelligent Cold Chain Logistics Equipment for Agricultural Products, Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Centre, Guangzhou 510006, China; Food Refrigeration and Computerized Food Technology (FRCFT), Agriculture and Food Science Centre, University College Dublin, National University of Ireland, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. Electronic address: dawen.sun@ucd.ie.

PMID: 37776705
DOI: 10.1016/j.saa.2023.123357

Abstract

High-performance plasmonic substrates have recently attracted much research attention. Herein, a three-dimensional gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) spherical liquid array (SLA) with high "hot spots" and tunable nanometer gap by optimizing the proportion of AuNPs colloids over chloroform was synthesized based on a water-oil interfacial self-assembly strategy. The substrate demonstrated excellent surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) performance using tetrathiafulvalene and rhodamine 6G (R6G) as probe molecules. With a simple extraction and soaking pretreatment process, the SLA exhibited high sensitivity for analysing triazophos on apple peels, with a limit of detection (LOD) of 0.005 µg/mL and recovery ranging from 96 to 110 %. Particularly, the chloroform produced an inherent characteristic peak at 665 cm^-1, which was used as the internal standard to correct SERS signal fluctuation, leading to an improvement of the corresponding coefficient R² from 0.97 to 0.99, thus improving the reproducibility. Therefore the SLA substrate possesses the potential for quantitative analysis of food contaminants.

Keywords: Interfacial self-assembly; Pesticide detection; Spherical liquid array; Surface-enhanced Raman scattering.