Greenness metrics of immunoassays for the detection of organophosphorus pesticide residues

Abstract

Environmental protection has always been a hot topic, and the irresponsible use of organophosphorus pesticides has caused severe damage to the environment. The advantages of immunoassays for the detection of pesticides has allowed more researchers to develop and improve methods, in particular the performance of the assay, with few researchers considering the environmental impact of the method. The 12 principles of Green Analytical Chemistry (GAC) represent a guide for the development of environmentally friendly analytical methods. Eco-Scale and Green Analytical Procedure Index (GAPI) are assessment metrics based on GAC, where GAPI is used to assess the green characteristics of the entire analytical method from sample collection to final determination, and the difference in color gives an evaluation of the environmental impact involved in each step. In this paper, we modified GAPI to make it more suitable for the assessment of immunoassays, and combined it with Eco-Scale penalty rules to give scores for the sample preparation and assay steps, and finally to obtain the assessment results intuitively for the method so that researchers and users can choose. We used this tool for the immunoassay evaluation of chlorpyrifos in vegetables, and the method showed good reliability and consistency with scoring.