Evaluation of the SERS‐based strategy in fast and on‐site food safety inspection: Qualitative and quantitative analysis of trace unexpected herbicide in complicated herbicide matrix

Abstract

Recently, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS)-based detection strategies have been widely developed for various practical applications, due to the near-single-molecule sensitivity and fingerprint identification capability. However, the qualitative and quantitative reliability of SERS have always been questioned when comparing with the classical GC/LC-MS techniques. Here, we systematically compared the properties of SERS and LC-MS in the detection of an unexpected herbicide in commercial herbicide. The result showed that, in the case of the ultra-trace target detection in a complicated matrix, SERS-based strategy exhibited high sensitivity and a much higher detection efficiency than the LC-MS-based one, which demonstrated a more accurate quantifiability being facilitated with a well-controlled sample pretreatment. Therefore, we showed that SERS could be further implemented in fast and on-site detection tools for food safety application and environment monitoring. K E Y W O R D S fast and on-site detection, high sensitivity, non-targeting detection, reliable quantifiability, surfaceenhanced Raman spectroscopy Cheng Pan and Hongju Chen contributed equally to this study.

Environment and food safety: a novel integrative review

“…Besides, Listeria monocytogenes was intensively studied by researchers (Anast et al 2020;Kawacka et al 2020;Wu et al 2020b). Another common word was analysis, such as analysis of herbicide (Pan et al 2020), analysis of bacteria (Kang et al 2020), and analysis of microplastics (Primpke et al 2020). Other common research topics revealed by title analysis included but are not limited to food quality, food production, food processing, food additive, food contamination, detection of food contaminants, food microbiology, environmental impact, as well as water, soil, animal, fish, meat, and dairy.…”

Non-Destructive Screening of Sodium Metabisulfite Residue on Shrimp by SERS with Copy Paper Loaded with AgNP

“…SERS spectra can give vibrational spectroscopic fingerprints from chemical and biological materials and therefore provide a comprehensive characterization tool to gain an understanding of the molecular structure [ 10 , 11 ]. Therefore, SERS offers high sensitivity and specificity in molecular identification and is a promising tool for the detection of adverse residues in food [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ].…”