Abstract
Foodborne diseases are a major health concern that can have severe impact on society and can add tremendous financial burden to our health care systems. Rapid early detection of food contamination is therefore relevant for the containment of food-borne pathogens. Conventional pathogen detection methods, such as microbiological and biochemical identification are time-consuming and laborious, while immunological or nucleic acid-based techniques require extensive sample preparation and are not amenable to miniaturization for on-site detection. Biosensors have shown tremendous promise to overcome these limitations and are being aggressively studied to provide rapid, reliable and sensitive detection platforms for such applications. Novel biological recognition elements are studied to improve the selectivity and facilitate integration on the transduction platform for sensitive detection. Bacteriophages are one such unique biological entity that show excellent host selectivity and have been actively used as recognition probes for pathogen detection. This review summarizes the extensive literature search on the application of bacteriophages (and recently their receptor binding proteins) as probes for sensitive and selective detection of foodborne pathogens, and critically outlines their advantages and disadvantages over other recognition elements.
Highlights
The results clearly indicated that wtRBPs show a low bacterial capture density of 5.71 ± 0.24 bacteria/100 μ2 compared to mutant receptor binding proteins (RBPs)
Magnetoelastic sensors have been immobilized with filamentous bacteriophages for the detection of various bacteria including Salmonella typhimurium and Bacillus anthracis spores in different food matrixes such as fat free milk, and fresh tomato [24,67,75]
Bacteriophages have recently been looked upon as an attractive alternative probe for pathogen detection owing to their excellent specificity and selectivity to their host and ease of amplification
Summary
Bacteria are omnipresent and their existence in food is natural. While the majority of bacterial strains are harmless or even beneficial to humans, several others, being pathogenic in nature, can cause severe threats to health and safety and consequentially inflict tremendous burden on our socio-economic balance and health care systems. More sophisticated traditional analytical methods such as liquid/gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrophotometry have been used for more accurate analysis of pathogen. These methods have enjoyed tremendous popularity, their feasibility towards point-of-care onsite pathogen monitoring tools is hard to realize. Biosensors are analytical devices which translate a specific bio-recognition event into a measurable signal They offer several advantages such as high degree of sensitivity and specificity of detection, minimal sample preparation, cost-effectiveness, miniaturization and portability for in situ real time monitoring and reduced overall time required for detection. Biosensors do not require the time-consuming sample pre-enrichment and secondary enrichment steps and can accurately predict the level and kind of food contamination much faster compared to conventional microbiological, immunological and molecular biological methods. This review will discuss different bio-probes and transduction platforms that have been successfully leveraged for pathogen detection with a focus on recent advances in biosensor technology for on-site detection
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