QCM Sensor Arrays, Electroanalytical Techniques and NIR Spectroscopy Coupled to Multivariate Analysis for Quality Assessment of Food Products, Raw Materials, Ingredients and Foodborne Pathogen Detection: Challenges and Breakthroughs

Abstract

Quality checks, assessments, and the assurance of food products, raw materials, and food ingredients is critically important to ensure the safeguard of foods of high quality for safety and public health. Nevertheless, quality checks, assessments, and the assurance of food products along distribution and supply chains is impacted by various challenges. For instance, the development of portable, sensitive, low-cost, and robust instrumentation that is capable of real-time, accurate, and sensitive analysis, quality checks, assessments, and the assurance of food products in the field and/or in the production line in a food manufacturing industry is a major technological and analytical challenge. Other significant challenges include analytical method development, method validation strategies, and the non-availability of reference materials and/or standards for emerging food contaminants. The simplicity, portability, non-invasive, non-destructive properties, and low-cost of NIR spectrometers, make them appealing and desirable instruments of choice for rapid quality checks, assessments and assurances of food products, raw materials, and ingredients. This review article surveys literature and examines current challenges and breakthroughs in quality checks and the assessment of a variety of food products, raw materials, and ingredients. Specifically, recent technological innovations and notable advances in quartz crystal microbalances (QCM), electroanalytical techniques, and near infrared (NIR) spectroscopic instrument development in the quality assessment of selected food products, and the analysis of food raw materials and ingredients for foodborne pathogen detection between January 2019 and July 2020 are highlighted. In addition, chemometric approaches and multivariate analyses of spectral data for NIR instrumental calibration and sample analyses for quality assessments and assurances of selected food products and electrochemical methods for foodborne pathogen detection are discussed. Moreover, this review provides insight into the future trajectory of innovative technological developments in QCM, electroanalytical techniques, NIR spectroscopy, and multivariate analyses relating to general applications for the quality assessment of food products.

A Miniaturized Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM) Measurement Instrument Based on a Phase-Locked Loop Circuit

“…In our developed system, we used an amplifier gain of 34, which gave a calculated system sensitivity of approximately 1.43 mV/Hz. The measurable frequency shift range was approximately from 0 Hz to 1400 Hz with that sensitivity, which was a suitable frequency range for detecting most VOCs of interest [5][6][7][8][9][10].…”

“…Quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) has become one of the most common mass sensing techniques and has seen a wide variety of industrial applications, such as electronic noses [1,2] and electronic tongues [3,4]. These applications include food quality control [5][6][7][8], various forms of chemical detection [9,10], and biomolecular recognition [6][7][8]. Recently, QCM techniques with specialized sensor coatings have been widely applied for multiple analyte detections through the construction of multi-sensor arrays.…”

Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and Machine Learning: Analysis and Classification Methods of Rice

“…Barnaby et al correlated the grain chalk of rice to the genomic regions of NIR spectra [101]. These spectral regions can be applied in the automation of grain chalk quantification and potentially for other grain products as well [131].…”

Practical Use of Quartz Crystal Microbalance Monitoring in Cartilage Tissue Engineering

“…QCM is the most popular and widely used acoustic transducer for sensor applications that has become widely acceptable in chemical and biosensing fields. The practical importance of QCM has been well-emphasized in the literature, as this technology can be used in various areas, such as: environmental monitoring [ 41 ], food industries [ 42 ], viscosity measurement [ 43 ], humidity and gas sensors, metal film deposition, biosensing, etc. [ 44 ].…”