Biological Visual Detection for Advanced Photocatalytic Oxidation toward Pesticide Detoxification

Photocatalytic oxidation treatment is an emerging and fast developed eco-friendly, energy-saving, and efficient advanced oxidation technology for degrading hazardous pesticides. The conventional chemical detection to evaluate the effects for this process depends on the broken chemical structure, only giving residual content and product chemical composition. However, it misses direct visual detection on the toxicity and the quantitative analysis of pesticide detoxification. Here, we develop a novel strategy to combine photocatalytic oxidation with a zebrafish biological model to provide a direct visual detection on the environmental detoxification. The mortality or deformity of zebrafish embryos (ZEs) acts as an indicator. Over the irradiation duration threshold, the mortality of ZEs decreases to 23.3% for pure chlorothalonil (CTL-P) after photocatalytic oxidation treatment for 1 h, and the deformity reduces to 13.3% for commercial CTL (CTL-C) after 30 min and to 3.33% for tetramethylthiuram disulfide (TMTD) after 20 min. The toxicity of CTL-C and TMTD could be completely removed by photocatalytic oxidation treatment and causes no damage to the ZE developmental morphology. Chemical analyses demonstrate the degradation of CTL into inorganic compounds and TMTD into small organic molecules. Among these highlighted heterogeneous photocatalysts (g-C₃N₄, BiVO₄, Ag₃PO₄, and P25), g-C₃N₄ exhibits the highest photocatalytic detoxification for CTL-P, CTL-C, and TMTD.