Chapter 5 - Electrochemical biosensors: Biomonitoring of food adulterants, allergens, and pathogens

Abstract

Ever-growing human populations across the globe face the challenge of adequate food production to feed all and minimize food wastage while ensuring the quality and safety of the consumers. Rapid and precise analytical devices are essential for biomonitoring food safety and screening of any undesirable contaminants, allergens, and pathogens, which may pose substantial health risks on consumption. Significant developments have been made for the detection and analysis of these contaminants. However, these conventional techniques suffer from the drawback of being time-intensive, labor-intensive, and expensive. Biosensing technology with its widespread applicability is currently applied to address the challenges of food production and management ensuring sustainability. Nanomaterials showing promising features like sensitivity, selectivity, specificity, and lower limit of detection hold immense potential for the development of biosensors enabling simple, rapid, accurate, low-cost, portable, on-site analysis of food adulterants, allergens, toxins, pathogens, and spurious chemicals, etc. Nanomaterials incorporated electrochemical biosensors are increasingly used for the screening of markers in food samples, managing food waste, and preventing food-borne outbreaks. Recently, electrochemical affinity biosensors including immunosensors, or genosensors based on nucleic acids, aptamers, peptide, or switch-based probes, are gaining ground for the detection of food allergens, and adulterants owing to their simplicity, rapidity, and applicability in diverse environments. This chapter analyzes and throws light on the current state of developments in biosensing related to food production, packaging, transportation, safety, and quality. It also focuses on the principal components, and requirements of a model biosensor, its types, and applications in the food industry.