A cellulose-based colour test-strip for equipment-free drug detection on-site: application to sulfadiazine in aquatic environment

This work develops a simple and innovative test-strip to monitor antibiotics in aquaculture facilities by an equipment-free approach. It consists of a low-cost disposable cellulose paper that was chemically modified to produce a colour change when in contact with a given antibiotic. In brief, the cellulose substrate was subject to oxidation with periodate, followed by amination with chitosan binding and modification with Cu(II). The test strip was then dipped in the target solution and the intensity of the colour generated therein revealed the concentration of antibiotic present for concentrations higher than 0.5 mM. The higher the concentration in sulfadiazine (SDZ), the more intense the pink colour formed in the final solution, which was also turbid due to the insolubility of the formed product. This colour intensity also varied linearly with the logarithm of the SDZ concentration (from 0.5 to 5 mM), when plotted against the sum of the RGB coordinates extracted from digital pictures. The linear equation of this response was represented by (R + G + B) = − 256.1 log(SDZ, mol/L) − 362.0, with an R-squared of 0.9913. The test-strip was stable for at least 15 days and was selective in the presence of tetracycline and difloxacin, while the response to other members of the sulfadiazine family requires prior evaluation. Overall, the test-strips developed herein are inexpensive and provide valuable (semi-) quantitative data for monitoring SDZ in waters, a most valuable approach to control and reduce the level of antibiotics in fish tanks, which in turn may reduce the costs of fish production and the environmental concerns linked to this practice. Moreover, the test strip uses a cellulose substrate that has little environmental impact upon discard.The authors acknowledge funding from project PTDC/AAG-TEC/5400/2014, POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016637 funded by European through FEDER (European Funding or Regional Development) via COMPETE2020—POCI (operational program for internationalization and competitively) and by national funding through the National Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P.