Fumigants are a group of highly toxic vaporous chemicals that have been commonly used in agriculture productions to control growth of pests in soil and maintain good production yields of crops such as strawberry. The high vapor pressure of fumigants makes them readily emit into the atmosphere and diffuse to vicinal areas, becoming a serious hazardous concern to farm workers and local residents, especially children. Detection of such toxic gases in ambient air or in the fields will be a measure of protection of fumigant applicators and residents from unexpected exposures to the chemicals. While current detection methods are mostly instrument based and difficult to provide cost-efficiently and instant detection of the hazardous chemicals, we have been focusing on development of paper-based colorimetric sensors to detect ultralow concentrations of fumigants in air. Most of the paper-based, easy-to-use colorimetric sensors are based on chemical or biological reactions that are causing toxic effects to mammalian body. One of the examples is to use glutathione, a tripeptide detoxify agent in mammalian cells. In addition, with the use of nanofibrous membranes and control of selective adsorptions of fumigants onto the surfaces, we were able to create environment favoring spontaneous reactions between different targets and the detecting materials, resulting ultrahigh sensitivity and selectivity to fumigants. The presentation will discuss the mechanism of fumigant detection and control of reaction conditions of the sensors.<br/>

Highly sensitive and selective detections of fumigants on paper based colorimetric sensors

254th National Meeting (2017)

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