A Molecularly Imprinted Cotton Fabric for Rapid, Selective and Sensitive Determination of Carbendazim in Orange Juice

Abstract

Carbendazim is a type of benzimidazole fungicide commonly used to protect agricultural crops. It has high chemical stability and a long degradation half-life, which increases the potential for environmental accumulation. Herein, carbendazim-imprinted cotton fabric (MIPCF) was fabricated for the selective and sensitive detection of carbendazim in orange juice samples using spectrofluorimetry. The imprinted cotton fabrics were characterized using a variety of surface characterization techniques, and the results revealed the grafting of a polymer layer onto the cotton fabric. Furthermore, the MIPCF had a high adsorption capacity of 96.9 mg/g and an imprinting factor of 4.36. Importantly, MIPCF demonstrated satisfactory regeneration capability, enduring up to ten regeneration cycles without significantly reducing its initial adsorption capacity. The proposed method had excellent linearity with a correlation coefficient of 0.999 and a limit of detection of 1.12 mu g/L for carbendazim in orange juice samples. The proposed method exhibited acceptable recovery ranges (99.2-100 %) accompanied by lower inter-day and intra-day precisions. It is inferred that the proposed method offers a promising alternative for quantifying fungicides compared to conventional spectroscopic or chromatographic techniques.