Dot Elisa: Immunological Technique for Pesticide Residue Analysis

Pesticides are used globally for enhancing crop yields. However, their excessive use/misuse, especially in the developing countries, results in widespread food and environmental contamination. Therefore current methods such as gas chromatography and high-performance liquid chromatography have been used successfully, with great sensitivity and reliability, for analysis of many pesticides. However, these classical methods require a high capital expenditure and skilled analysts including time-consuming sample preparation steps. Therefore, there is a growing demand for more rapid and economical methods for determining pesticide residues. Immunoassays have recently been emerging as an alternative to traditional methods to meet such demands of fast, sensitive and cost-effective tool for pesticide residue analysis. The dot ELISA is a qualitative ELISA test, which can be performed more quickly without the need of equipments or technical expertise. Dot ELISA is a micro ELISA, utilizing antigen “dotted” onto nitrocellulose filter discs that has been used for more than 25 years. Because of its relative speed and simplicity, the dot ELISA is an attractive alternative to standard ELISA .This technique can even detect at nano-gram scale among targeted compounds in situ.