Application of a commercial immunoassay to the direct determination of insecticide imidacloprid in fruit juices

An ELISA was used to directly determine residual imidacloprid in fruit juices. Imidacloprid could be determined by only diluting samples without any pre-treatments such as filtration, centrifugation, and clean-up procedures. The ELISA enabled imidacloprid to accurately determine down to about 5 μg/L in apple and grape juice samples and down to about 20 μg/L in orange juice sample. Recovery and precision of the ELISA were evaluated by spiking fruit juice samples with imidacloprid in the 10–400 μg/L ranges. Coefficients of variation were lower than 20% in all cases, and average recoveries were 94.2%, 113.2%, and 104.2% for apple, grape, and orange juice samples, respectively. No false positive results were found. The results obtained with the proposed ELISA well correlated with the reference HPLC for each fruit juice sample (r > 0.99).