Review on Biosensors for Food Safety

Background: Frequent outbreaks of foodborne illness have been increased awareness of food safety. CDC estimates that each year roughly 48 million people gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases in US. In Korea, 6,058 were hospitalized and 266 incidents were reported in 2012. It is required to develop rapid methods to identify hazard substances in food products for protecting and maintaining safety of the public health. However, conventional methods for pathogens detection and identification involve prolonged multiple enrichment steps. Purpose: This review aims to provide information on biosensors to detect pathogens in food products to enhance food safety. Results: Foodborne outbreaks continue to occur and outbreaks from various food sources have increased the need for simple, rapid, and sensitive methods to detect foodborne pathogens. Conventional methods for foodborne pathogens detection require tremendous amount of labor and time. Biosensors have drawn attentions in recent years because of their ability to detect analytes sensitively and rapidly. Principles along with their advantages and disadvantages of a variety of food safety biosensors including fiber optic biosensor, impedimetric biosensor, surface Plasmon resonance biosensor, and nano biosensor were explained. Also, future trends for the food safety biosensors were discussed.