Recent advances in sensors for detecting food pathogens, contaminants, and toxins: a review

Food safety being a vast global public health threat has attracted growing concern. Efficient detection techniques for food hazards are essential to ensure food safety. Various methods have been established to sense food hazards for solving food safety-related problems. However, due to trace levels of food contaminants, pathogens, and toxins, the development of efficient and reliable detection techniques has been challenging work. The use of novel and rapid sensors as sensing tools has speeded up the progression of food safety assays since they are sensitive, fast, and portable. This review deals with brief descriptions of the toxic effects of food pathogens, mycotoxins, and food contaminants (pesticides, acrylamide, food allergens, and antibiotics). This review provides the mechanisms and advances of different sensors (i.e., fluorescence sensors, colorimetric sensors, biosensors, and electronic nose sensors) of the last 5 years for food hazards’ detection. The applications of these four types of sensors for detecting food pathogens, mycotoxins, and food contaminants have been summarized in a single review article for the first time. Future perspectives and challenges in this bright field are tentatively suggested in the end.