Chapter 5 - Nanomaterials and signal amplification toward foodborne pathogen biosensor

Abstract

Foodborne pathogens pose important risks to both human health and food safety worldwide. Contamination of foodborne pathogens negatively affects human and environmental health and causes enormous economic losses. Therefore, accurate, rapid, and sensitive detection is a critical step to ensure food safety. Traditional methods, including culture and colony counting, immunology-based, and polymerase chain reaction-based methods for detecting foodborne pathogens, are often cumbersome and cannot provide the desired level of sensitivity. While the cost increases due to time-consuming sample preparation procedures, these methods require bulky equipment that allows analysis only under laboratory conditions. Biosensors are valuable because of their ease of use, portability, relatively low cost, and suitability for highly sensitive and selective detection of foodborne pathogens. In addition, developments in nanotechnology contribute to developing new nanomaterials and their combinations. Nanomaterials and their composite structures are frequently used in sensor designs due to their exciting features, such as large surface area, high porosity, catalytic activity, conductivity, and thermal and physicochemical properties. By combining the advanced properties of nanomaterials and the selectivity of biorecognition elements, the use of nanomaterials-based biosensors in analyzing foodborne pathogens is increasing daily. In this chapter, first, the definition of foodborne pathogens is given. Then, information is mentioned about the properties of nanomaterials and their use in sensors. The outlines of recent developments in nanomaterial-based biosensors developed for determining and detecting foodborne pathogens are summarized and tabulated through some selected studies. Finally, challenges and future perspectives on this topic are discussed.