Applications of magnetic nanomaterials in the fabrication of lateral flow assays toward increasing performance of food safety analysis: Recent advances

Abstract

Up to now, the life of humans is complex, and it has been under attack by numerous factors. In other words, human beings are relationship with living in a healthy and clean environment. Remarkably, life on the planet Earth has been threatened by food contamination in all areas of the world. Over the last few years, the portability of analytical methods has received considerable attention in biosensors. Among these, lateral flow assays (LFAs) can consider one of the critical types of portable sensing platforms. The vast majority of conventional LFAs operate according to the gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) signaling. However, the presence of NaCl in real samples can decrease the performance of the AuNPs-LFA. Thereby, the substitute of AuNPs with other types of nanomaterials (NMs) or using hybrid NMs can boost the application of these sensing biodevices in different real samples. Elaborately, magnetic nanomaterials (MNMs) can play a significant role in developing sensing approaches, especially later flow assays LFAs. These NMs not only do quantitative measurements by coupling with an external reader, but they can also act as an immunomagnetic separation agent. In addition, ease of use, less coat, and size uniformity can highlight their application in food safety. Therefore, the application of MNMs in LFA with different formats can significantly reduction in the limit of detection (LOD) of the analyte without methodically complicating the analytical procedure. In this review, we attempted to highlight the recent progress and technical breakthroughs of MNMs in LFA for food safety.