Abstract
Food safety remains one of the most important issues in most countries and the detection of food hazards plays a key role in the systematic approach to ensuring food safety. Rapid, easy-to-use and low-cost analytical tools are required to detect chemical hazards in foods. As a promising candidate, microfluidic paper-based analytical devices (μPADs) have been rarely applied to real food samples for testing chemical hazards, although numerous papers have been published in this field in the last decade. This review discusses the current status and concerns of the μPAD applications in the detection of chemical hazards in foods from the perspective of food scientists, mainly for an audience with a background in mechanical and chemical engineering who may have interests in exploring the potential of μPAD to address real-world food safety issues.
Highlights
Consuming safe and nutritious foods is a fundamental need and a prerequisite for maintaining physical and mental health for human beings [1]
Depending upon the detection principle, the analyte may not have to be present in the free form completely, which may reduce the technical challenges in sample preparation or be total exempted
The μPAD is still in its infancy stage [26] and limited studies have been reported on the application of detecting chemical hazards in foods, more designs that are applicable to real food samples would emerge as the μPAD gains maturity and the market of food testing is more recognized
Summary
Consuming safe and nutritious foods is a fundamental need and a prerequisite for maintaining physical and mental health for human beings [1]. Food hazards refer to any agents with the potential to cause adverse health consequences to the consumers [3] These agents can be mainly classified into three categories: physical, chemical, and biological hazards. There seems to be a gap in understanding the detection of food hazards for researchers without adequate food science background, which could possibly have increased the challenges in translating the device fabrication techniques to real-world applications and eventually to final commercial products. The current review discusses the current status and concerns of the μPAD applications in detecting chemical hazards in foods from the perspective of food scientists, mainly for an audience with a background in mechanical and chemical engineering who may have special interests in exploring the potential of using μPAD to address real-world food safety issues. Self-claimed as μPADs and sometimes counted in reviews elsewhere, studies that rely on nitrocellulose membrane are not included in this review
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