Research Projects

Pesticide and insecticide residues in fruits and vegetables is a widespread health risk of increasing concern. With trade in these items across state and national borders, efficient and fast quantitative testing for harmful chemical residues is required for enforcing safety norms regarding allowed concentrations. The project is on the design of a fast, efficient and handheld device for testing for Organophosphate Pesticides and Pyrethroid Insecticides. Extracts from fruits and vegetables are loaded on to capillaries coated with silver nanoparticles with silica coatings that form a plasmonic platform that gives optimized surface-enhanced Raman spectra of the molecules in the extract. An integrated data processing suite would extract signatures of target pesticide and insecticide molecules and estimate their quantities using the relative strengths of their Raman signatures in the composite surface enhanced spectrum.