Abstract
The control of chemical residues is essential in honey's marketing to
ensure consumer safety¿« Equipments available in the market reach the required limit of detection (LOD) (e.g Liquid Cromatography-HPLC) but are not suitable for insitu implantation in honey packaging industry. The reasons are: Require highly qualified staff, High cost, Time-consuming « Other approaches available in the market, although faster and without the need of qualified staff, do not reach the required LODs. Piezoelectric immunosensors based on High Fundamental Frequency Quartz Crystal Microbalance (HFF-QCM) combined with an antigen-antibody recognition process, are alternative or complementary technologies suitable for chemical residues control in food.« The analytical performance of AWS A20 and AWS F20 platforms (based on HFF-QCM technology), has been tested for the detection of pesticide residues (DDT) in honey.
¿« AWS platforms lead to the following benefits: Lower cost, Less sample/reagent consumption, Label-free, direct and real time transduction¿« DDT standard curves performed in laboratory buffer provided: Sensitivity (estimated as the I50 value): 0.62 £gg/L, LOD in the 0.05 - 0.1 £gg/L range.
