Application of Sensors and Biosensors in Food Safety and Quality Control

The quality of life considerably depends on human health, food safety, and environmental state. Sensing-basedgadgets in food safety and quality have become indispensable in today’s world. It is an urgent demand formonitoring food against different contaminants, like toxins, pesticides, microbes, unauthorized additives, andchemical compounds with the goal of overcoming health hazards associated with foodborne illness, food allergy,and food poisoning.Foodborne diseases and public health are major concerns in human societies all over the world. Therefore, one ofthe most demanding points is the accessibility of rapid, sensitive, and reliable analytical detection technologies tomake factual assessments of the risks of human and animal infections or contaminations generated by variousfood hazards. There are the conventional analytical methods for the food hazards determination, including liquidchromatography mass spectrometry (LCMS), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), massspectroscopy (MS), atomic absorption/emission spectroscopy (AAS/AES), anodic stripping voltammetry (ASV),etc. However, these techniques require expensive instruments, multiple sample-pretreatment processes, andintricate operation procedures that restrict their application. Thus, it is an essential demand to develop simple,cost-effective, and user friendly methods for the food hazards determination. Therefore, the accessibility ofrapid, sensitive, and reliable analytical detection technologies is a global research priority. Biosensor technologyrepresents a cutting-edge frontier in food safety diagnosis of the agro-food sector.Biosensors have the ability to overcome all these disadvantages by offering quick, inexpensive as well as nondestructiveprocedures for quality control and pave way for the quick identification of allergens, pathogens, andpesticide residues present in food. Biosensors are made up of two basic parts: a bioreceptor or biologicalrecognition element and a transducer. Biosensors offer real-time detection of biomolecular interactions bylinking a biological recognition element to a transducer. Aptamers as bioprobes in the structure of biosensorshave been highly considered. Aptasensors are a kind of biosensors that serve aptamers as bioreceptors.Aptamers- chemical antibodies can bind specifically to the respective and different analyte molecules with highaffinity. In aptasensors, the binding event translates into detectable and measurable signals by a transducer whichcan have two sub-components including signal amplifier and detector/reporter. The discovery of aptamers was amajor step toward new horizons not only in biosensing but also in diagnostics. The advantages of aptamers suchas easy chemical modification, flexibility, and high affinity provide the opportunity to immobilize them on thesurface of electrodes through various methods and to adopt different strategies to design appropriate biosensorsfor the detection of a wide range of targets. The utilization of aptamers in a wide range of target analytes such asbiomarkers, cancer cells, microorganisms, viruses, and drug settings for both quantitative and qualitativepurposes has yielded favorable outcomes.In this speech, we make mainly a review about the recent development of functional biosensors for detection offood safety threatens analytes. We present the technological aspect of lateral flow kits in food safety as commoncommercial rapid tests in markets and also the liquid crystal aptasensor as a novel generation of ultra-sensitivebiosensors. Developed lateral flow rapid tests have been used in recognition of different chemical and biologicalanalyes such as antibiotics residues in dairy products, meat or seafood and, honey. A lateral flow chip composeof PVC backing card, sample pad, conjugated pad, nitrocellulose pad, absorbent pad and, cassette case. In thisclass of biosensors antibodies usually have been used as bio-recognition element which conjugated with goldnanoparticles as colorimetric tags.Researchers’ attention about the next generation of the biosensors, moved to portable devices and point of care(POC) market. The appearance of liquid crystals (LCs) biosensors as a promise POC device opened a newperspective and opportunities for scientists. These soft materials with fluidity and long-range order in orientationhave properties intermediate between solid and liquid. LCs with very low anchoring energy that makes themvery sensitive to external stimuli are responsive materials to any nano-scale interfacial interactions based on thechange of orientation LC mesogens. Since, LCs is birefringent materials, the polarizing microscopy with vicinitymolecular occurring takes distinctive optical images. In addition, LC-biosensors are label-free, high sensitive andselective assays for the detection of analytes without using bulky and expensive instrumentation. Therefore, LCaptasensorshave been applied for the detection of some analytes in over a decade. Verdian et al. developedseveral LC-aptasensors for food hazards monitoring such as antibiotics, mycotoxins, PCB۷۷, heavy metal ions,phycotoxin and so on. It has been shown that this new generation of biosensors can be portable through asmartphone and are promise device for the practical application in industrial world and people’s daily life, andwill probably to be very popular in near future.

کلیدواژه ها:

food safety ، biosensor ، detection ، user-friend ، rapid-detection.