Copper Oxide Nanorods Pesticide Sensor For Methyl Parathion Detection

Currently, most electrochemical based pesticide sensors use acetylcholinesterase enzyme modifying on working electrode surface to sense the concentration of the organophosphate pesticides. Since this method has high sensitivity and easy to prepare; however the cost of the enzyme is very expensive and the stability of the enzyme activity is poor which result in short lifetime. From those drawbacks of current pesticide sensor, non-enzymatic sensor is an alternative way to detect pesticide with lower cost, higher sensitivity and stability. In this work, copper oxide nanorods were used to overcome the difficulties of enzymatic pesticide sensor. To obtain cost effective and simple preparation pesticide sensor, direct anodization and annealing processes were used to synthesize copper oxide nanorods. We used our synthesized copper oxide nanorods in electrochemical analysis by performing cyclic voltammetry in organophosphate pesticide. Our copper oxide nanorods electrode exhibits sensitivity and detection limit of 1.234 µA/ng mL⁻¹ and 0.0761 ng/mL, respectively. Our copper oxide nanorods electrode provides high sensitivity and desirable detection limit with higher stability and lower cost than the common enzyme-based pesticide sensor.