With increasing adulteration, food safety analysis has become an important research field. Nanomaterials-based biosensing holds great potential in designing highly sensitive and selective detection strategies necessary for food safety analysis. This review summarizes various function types of nanomaterials, the methods of functionalization of nanomaterials, and recent (2014–present) progress in the design and development of nanobiosensing for the detection of food contaminants including pathogens, toxins, pesticides, antibiotics, metal contaminants, and other analytes, which are sub-classified according to various recognition methods of each analyte. The existing shortcomings and future perspectives of the rapidly growing field of nanobiosensing addressing food safety issues are also discussed briefly.

Endonuclease V (EndoV) plays the important role of nucleotide excision repair (NER) in the maintenance of genomic stability. Highly sensitive detection of EndoV was achieved through an oligonucleotides sensitizing Tb luminescent technique. We found that although both guanine-rich (G-rich) single-stranded DNA and dGMP could enhance the time-resolved luminescence of Tb, their efficiencies of enhancement were considerably different. Employing such interesting phenomenon, a label-free and time-resolved luminescent strategy for the sensitive detection of EndoV activity was developed based on DNA-enhanced time-resolved luminescence (TRL) of Tb. The EndoV was used to cut off the deoxyinosine site (dI) and convert the 3'-protruding termini to a recessed end, and Exonuclease III (Exo III) was used to enhance the signal contrast via digestion of G-rich DNA to dNTP. Combining with the natural advantages of the TRL, the proposed method exhibited a good linear response to EndoV ranging from 0.005 to 0.4 U/mL, with a low limit of detection of 0.005 U/mL.

No abstract