In situ food-borne pathogen sensors in a nanoconfined space by surface enhanced Raman scattering

Abstract

The incidence of disease arising from food-borne pathogens is increasing continuously and has become a global public health problem. Rapid and accurate identification of food-borne pathogens is essential for adopting disease intervention strategies and controlling the spread of epidemics. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has attracted increasing interest due to the attractive features including simplicity, rapid measurement, and high sensitivity. It can be used for rapid in situ sensing of single and multicomponent samples within the nanostructure-based confined space by providing molecular fingerprint information and has been demonstrated to be an effective detection strategy for pathogens. This article aims to review the application of SERS to the rapid sensing of food-borne pathogens in food matrices. The mechanisms and advantages of SERS, and detection strategies are briefly discussed. The latest progress on the use of SERS for rapid detection of food-borne bacteria and viruses is considered, including both the labeled and label-free detection strategies. In closing, according to the current situation regarding detection of food-borne pathogens, the review highlights the challenges faced by SERS and the prospects for new applications in food safety.

Recent Advances in Biosensor Development for the Detection of Viral Particles in Foods: A Comprehensive Review

“…SERS-based biosensors have emerged as a powerful tool for detecting foodborne viruses owing to advantages such as high sensitivity, rapidity, nondestructive detection, and low-level interference . The SERS effect is generated by a local electromagnetic field on or near the surface of plasmonic nanostructures, which can be enhanced by the adsorption of chemicals on the surface of the nanostructure. , This enhancement allows for extremely sensitive detection and identification of target molecules through Raman spectroscopy, in which the intensity of specific Raman peaks is related to the concentration of the target analyte. , SERS-based biosensors for detection of foodborne viruses are divided into labeled and label-free SERS biosensors . In the labeled detection, ligands that specifically recognize a target viral nucleic acid sequence are immobilized on the surface of nanostructures.…”

“…73 The SERS effect is generated by a local electromagnetic field on or near the surface of plasmonic nanostructures, which can be enhanced by the adsorption of chemicals on the surface of the nanostructure. 74,75 This enhancement allows for extremely sensitive detection and identification of target molecules through Raman spectroscopy, in which the intensity of specific Raman peaks is related to the concentration of the target analyte. 76,77 SERS-based biosensors for detection of foodborne viruses are divided into labeled and label-free SERS biosensors.…”

Advances in surface‐enhanced Raman spectroscopy technology for detection of foodborne pathogens

“…The label‐free SERS method, also known as direct detection, has the advantages of simplicity of operation, rapidity, and low cost by incubating the SERS substrate directly with the suspension of pathogenic bacteria to bring the bacteria close to the surface of the substrate, enhancing the Raman signal of the pathogens and obtaining their intrinsic fingerprint information (Liu et al., 2021; Zhang, Wu, et al., 2022). Due to the complex biological composition and rich spectral information of microorganism (Vaitiekunaite et al., 2022), relatively small Raman scattering cross section of most biomolecules (Chuesiang et al., 2021), presence of impurities in the actual samples, and other objective factors (Qu et al., 2021), research on label‐free detection is primarily devoted to three aspects: (i) isolation of pathogenic bacteria from complex food matrices and reduction of the interference of other components with the SERS spectra of target bacteria, (ii) preparation of SERS substrates with excellent sensitivity and repeatability to improve label‐free detection performance, and (iii) analysis of SERS spectra of bacteria and combination of multivariate statistical analysis techniques and machine learning algorithms to extract effective information in the spectra for identification and classification purposes.…”

In Situ Collection and Rapid Detection of Pathogenic Bacteria Using a Flexible SERS Platform Combined with a Portable Raman Spectrometer

“…Fortunately, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) technology has developed rapidly, which can not only build an ultrasensitive sensing platform with molecular recognition ability, but can also realize single-molecule detection [9,10]. SERS, as a powerful technique with sensitive, rapid and non-destructive features, can characterize the molecular structure of bacteria and enable rapid label-free detection [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. In addition, there are a number of commercially available portable Raman spectrometers that can be easily used for field use [18,19].…”