Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Biotechnology, Rhodes University, PO Box 94, Grahamstown, 6140, South Africa.
Environ Monit Assess. 2013 Mar;185(3):2315-27. doi: 10.1007/s10661-012-2711-0. Epub 2012 Jun 9.
Organophosphate (OP) and carbamate (CP) pesticides act by the inhibition of acetylcholinesterase (AChE). This enables the use of this enzyme for the detection of these pesticides in the environment. While many studies have looked at the effect of single pesticides on AChE, the effect of mixtures of pesticides still requires extensive investigation. This is important to evaluate the cumulative risk in the case of simultaneous exposure to multiple pesticides. Therefore we examined the effect of five different pesticides (carbaryl, carbofuran, parathion, demeton-S-methyl, and aldicarb) on AChE activity to determine whether combinations had an additive, synergistic, or antagonistic inhibitory effect. Results indicated that the mixtures had an additive inhibitory effect on AChE activity. The data from the assays of the mixtures were used to develop and train an artificial neural network (ANN) which was then utilised successfully for the identification of pesticides and their concentrations in mixtures. This study is significant because it evaluated mixtures of OPs and CPs where previous studies focused on either OPs or CPs. Previous studies have only examined up to three pesticides while this study evaluated mixtures of five pesticides simultaneously. This is also the first study where an ANN was able to utilise data from the inhibition of a single enzyme to differentiate five different pesticides and their concentrations from mixtures.
有机磷（OP）和氨基甲酸酯（CP）农药通过抑制乙酰胆碱酯酶（AChE）起作用。这使得可以使用这种酶来检测环境中的这些农药。虽然许多研究都着眼于单一农药对 AChE 的影响，但农药混合物的影响仍需要广泛的研究。这对于评估同时接触多种农药时的累积风险很重要。因此，我们研究了五种不同农药（甲萘威、呋喃丹、对硫磷、S-甲基 灭多威和涕灭威）对 AChE 活性的影响，以确定混合物是否具有相加、协同或拮抗抑制作用。结果表明，混合物对 AChE 活性具有相加抑制作用。混合物的测定数据用于开发和训练人工神经网络（ANN），然后成功地用于识别混合物中的农药及其浓度。这项研究意义重大，因为它评估了 OP 和 CP 的混合物，而以前的研究仅关注 OP 或 CP。以前的研究只检查了三种农药，而这项研究同时评估了五种农药的混合物。这也是第一项研究，其中 ANN 能够利用单一酶抑制的数据来区分五种不同的农药及其从混合物中的浓度。
