Rapid multi-residue analysis of pesticides in agricultural products was studied by using LC-MS/MS. Pesticide residues in 10 g of homogenized agricultural products were extracted with 30 mL of acetonitrile and salted out with 4 g of anhydrous magnesium sulfate and 1 g of sodium chloride in the presence of citrate salts for buffering in a disposable tube. Co-extractives were removed by use of our...

An analytical method has been developed for the quantification of two herbicides (ethidimuron and methabenzthiazuron) and their two main soil derivatives. This method involves fluidized-bed extraction (FBE) prior to cleanup and analysis by reverse-phase liquid chromatography with UV detection at 282 nm. FBE conditions were established to provide efficient extraction without degradation of the f...

Manual solid-phase microextraction (SPME) coupled with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry is investigated as a possible alternative for the determination of petroleum hydrocarbons in soils. Spiked onto an agricultural soil is a commercial diesel fuel (DF) with the following composition by weight: 12% linear alkanes, 52% saturated hydrocarbons (branched and cyclic), 21% alkylated aromatic hydr...

Aflatoxins are considered unavoidable natural mycotoxins encountered in foods, animal feeds, and feed grains. In this study, we demonstrate the application of our recently developed real-time immunoquantitative PCR (RT iq-PCR) assay for sensitive detection and quantification of aflatoxins in poultry feed, two types of dairy feed (1 and 2), horse feed, whole kernel corn feed grains, and retail y...

We report the first use of a paper-based device coated with nanoceria as a simple, low-cost and rapid detection platform for the analysis of organophosphate (OP) pesticides using an enzyme inhibition assay with acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and choline oxidase (ChOX). In the presence of acetylcholine, AChE and ChOX catalyze the formation of H2O2, which is detected colorimetrically by a nanoceria-...

Blood is a highly complex bio-fluid with cellular components making up >40% of the total volume, thus making its analysis challenging and time-consuming. In this work, we introduce a high-throughput size-based separation method for processing diluted blood using inertial microfluidics. The technique takes advantage of the preferential cell focusing in high aspect-ratio microchannels coupled wit...

Disposable solid-phase microextraction fibers (SPMEs) were used to measure the availability of 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT) and its two primary transformation products, 2-amino-4,6-dinitrotoluene (2ADNT) and 4-amino-2,6-dinitrotoluene (4ADNT). The SPMEs (85-microm polyacrylate) and sediment-dwelling oligochaetes (Tubifex tubifex) were exposed to TNT-spiked sediment, to TNT-spiked sediment amende...

We study the heavy hitters and related sparse recovery problems in the low-failure probability regime. This regime is not well-understood, and has only been studied for non-adaptive schemes. The main previous work is on sparse recovery by Gilbert et al. (ICALP’13). We recognize an error in their analysis, improve their results, and contribute new non-adaptive and adaptive sparse recovery algori...

We investigate the statistical and algorithmic properties of random neural-network generative priors in a simple inference problem: spiked-matrix estimation. establish rigorous expression for performance Bayes-optimal estimator high-dimensional regime, identify threshold weak-recovery spike. Next, we derive message-passing algorithm taking into account latent structure spike, show that its is a...