Microemulsions as potential pesticidal carriers: A review

Pesticide formulations have a significant impact on sustainable and smart agriculture to deliver agrochemicals uniformly to target sites. However, conventional pesticide formulations have low aqueous dispersibility, high organic solvent content, and high environmental contamination. Overcoming these challenges, microemulsions with fascinating features are considered as one of the most promising pesticide formulations, following the development direction of agrochemicals to protect plants against insects and pests while achieving enhanced efficacy. Microemulsions are thermodynamically stable, optically isotropic, structurally flexible, and optimized formulations with controlled release rates and site-specific applications. Aside from offering several advantages over conventional pesticide formulations, the preparation of microemulsion-based pesticide formulations is not easy. Phase-inversion and phase-titration are potentially operative methods for formulating greener pesticide microemulsions for environmentally safe application. An overview of various formulations of highly effective and stable microemulsion-based pesticides is provided in this review to enable the reader to easily understand the important facts related to the formulation of microemulsion-based pesticides and their potential applications to protect crops from pre- or post-harvest diseases.