Electrochemical Sensors for Pesticide Residue Detection

Electrochemical sensors have emerged as promising tools for rapid pesticide screening in food and environmental samples because they combine simple instrumentation, fast response, portability, and compatibility with disposable electrodes. This review organizes recent progress through a cross-system framework linking pesticide class, interfacial electrochemical process, and material design. Carbon materials, metal-organic frameworks and their derivatives, metal nanoparticles, metal compounds, conducting polymers, MXene-based composites, and selected emerging materials are compared in terms of enrichment capability, charge-transfer regulation, catalytic amplification, recognition-layer integration, and suitability for real-sample analysis. Emphasis is placed on issues that are often under-discussed in performance-centered surveys, including matrix interference, electrode fouling, batch-to-batch reproducibility, storage stability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. Representative examples show that the most useful advances arise not simply from lowering the limit of detection but from improving structure-function understanding and translating interfacial design into robust analytical performance. Future work should prioritize standardized fabrication and benchmarking protocols, in situ and operando identification of active sites and interface evolution, matrix-specific antifouling validation, multiresidue and metabolite analysis, and hybrid portable devices coupled with intelligent readout.