Colorimetric sensing of malathion using palladium-gold bimetallic nanozyme

In this work, a simple, sensitive and selective label free colorimetric assay using palladium-gold nanorod as nanozyme is reported for malathion detection. Study investigates the peroxidase potential of the nanozyme on colorimetric substrates and explores the effect of selected organophosphates on their enzyme mimetic activity. Palladium-gold nanozyme shows excellent peroxidase mimetic activity with O-phenylenediamine in the presence of hydrogen peroxide. Its Kinetic parameters Km and kcat are better than horseradish peroxidase which makes it a superior enzyme. Nanozyme is stable over a broad temperature range (4–70 °C) and shows high peroxidase activity from 2 to 6 pH. The peroxidase activity of nanozyme is selectively quenched with increasing concentration of malathion and is the principle of developed assay. Assay has a lowest detection limit of 60 ng/ml and shows no cross-reaction with other analogous organophosphates or metal salts. Validation on tap water samples spiked with different concentrations of malathion shows good recovery in the range of 80–106%. Assay also displays good intra and inter-assay precision which lie in the range of 2.7–6.1% and 3.2–5.9% respectively. This study demonstrated the catalytic potential of palladium-gold nanorods, which can be employed as nanozyme for developing highly sensitive detection methods.