Status, Challenges, and future trends in fluorescent sensors for Point-of-Care food safety assessment

Abstract

The escalating demand for sensitive, reliable, and on-site quick methods for food safety assessment has greatly stimulated the advancement of fluorescence-based sensing techniques. Fluorescent sensing platforms are immeasurably promising in food safety analysis for their extremely flexible fluorophore adoption, diverse signal transduction mechanisms, and evident versatility in detecting nearly all contaminants. This comprehensive review summarizes the state of the art of fluorescent sensors/probes and the related devices for point-of-care (POC) food safety assessment. The optical properties of fluorophores, ranging from organic dyes to nanomaterials, are enumerated and compared, followed by an accounting of varying signal transduction mechanisms essential for fluorescent sensing systems and optimizations of their analytical performances. The review delves into the POC devices, including the device format, signal transducer, corresponding transduction mechanism, targets, and analytical performances. The advantages and limitations of each type of POC device are compared. Based on the challenges that impede the practical application of fluorescent POC devices, we prospect the research trends toward the multiplexed capacity for efficient analysis, multi-signal outputs for reliable detection, and multi-mechanism for high sensitivity. By revealing the deep insights behind the design and applications of the fluorescent sensing platforms, we anticipate that this paper can provide reference significance for researchers dedicated to the development of advanced methods for food safety and quality control.