Activated carbon@silver nanoparticles conjugates as SERS substrate for capturing malathion analyte molecules for SERS detection

Malathion is one of the commonly used organophosphate pesticides known to attack the central nervous system, posing a risk to humans and other animals upon exposure. The surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has been identified as an indispensable tool for chemical and biomolecular sensing. In this work, the facile fabrication of activated carbon (AC)-based colloidal SERS active substrate dubbed AC@AgNPs was designed by trapping AgNPs on the surface of AC for detection of varying concentrations of malathion. Apart from the higher concentrations of malathion, the rest of the normal Raman spectra of malathion standard solutions exhibited weak Raman signals. The intensity of peaks for 0.47 mg L⁻¹ were nearly non-existent which is an indication that the malathion pesticide could only be detected up to 0.95 mg L⁻¹ when using silica wafer. On the contrary, all the SERS spectra of malathion in wheat extracts adsorbed on AC@AgNPs substrate exhibited strong Raman signals. Quantitative analysis of malathion was performed by regression models developed using PLSR built with the raw spectra (no pretreatment), SNV-PLSR, and SNV-CARS-PLSR. The model with the most remarkable performance was established by using SNV-PLSR with r = 0.9869 and RPD = 4.61. This research shows that the proposed method can rapidly detect malathion residues in wheat, suggesting that it could be adopted for production process monitoring of other related food products to guarantee their safety for human and animal consumption.