Direct determination of dichlorvos in water by partial least square-discriminant analysis

This report describes a rapid, onsite method to analyze the dichlorvos pesticide in water. Dichlorvos is a broad-spectrum pesticide that has been used worldwide. As an organophosphorus pesticide, dichlorvos disrupts the nervous system by inhibiting the activity of acetyl cholinesterase. Traditional analysis of dichlorvos by chromatography is time-consuming and environmentally unfriendly. Therefore, rapid, on-site methods to analyze dichlorvos are needed. Here, we used for the first time Fourier transform near infrared spectroscopy combined with partial least square-discriminant analysis to determine the dichlorvos directly in water samples. Results were compared with traditional high-performance liquid chromatography data as reference. We found that over 9,000–8,333?cm^?1, the new method had a good performance with a classification accuracy of 100?% and a correlation coefficient of 0.92 between measured and reference data. The new method can also be used as a “concentration sieve” by setting up different levels of boundary, a parameter of partial least square-discriminant analysis, thus allowing rapid on-site screening.