Electronic tongue using an enzyme inhibition biosensor array for the resolution of pesticide mixtures

An electronic tongue has been developed, employing an array of inhibition biosensors and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The array of biosensors was formed by three amperometric pesticide biosensors that used different acetylcholinesterase (AChE) enzymes: the wild type from electric eel (EE) and two different genetically modified enzymes (B1 and B394). In order to model the response to dichlorvos and carbofuran mixtures, a total amount of 22 solutions were prepared, with random concentrations. Chronoamperometric responses of the biosensor array were used in order to obtain the inhibition bioelectronic tongue. Mean values of concentration of pesticides evaluated were 0.79 nM for dichlorvos and 4.1 nM for carbofuran. Good prediction ability was obtained with correlation coefficients better than 0.918 when the obtained values were compared with those expected for a set of 6 external test samples not used for training.