Biosensors for food quality assessment

1. Biosensors for Food Quality
Assessment
Living organism to check quality of
food

2. Food Quality
• Safety
• Shelf life
• Consistency

3. Biosensors can check:
• Nutritional component
• Epidemiological research
• Nutritional fact
• Microbial Content

4. Biosensors can check:
• Food Additives
• Pesticides and herbicides
• Heavy Metals

5. Analyte
• The substance which we have to
analyze/check
• Analyte can be:
1. Liquid = Most easy to detect
2. Solid = harder to detect
3. Paste = Intermediate

6. Qualities of Good Biosensor
• High selectivity and sensitivity
• Reliability
• Short Assay time
• Stability
• Simplicity
• Low cost for operation and storage

7. Biological sensing elements used in
biosensors
• Enzymes
• Antibodies
• Nucleic acids
• Full bacterial cell
• Whole tissue
• Higher organisms

8. Transducer
• The detector which detect the change like the
change in light/ frequency etc
Qualities of Transducers:
1. Electrochemical
2. Optical
3. Mass change
4. Thermal change

9. Traditional method
• LC (Liquid chromatography)
• GC (gas chromatography)
• HPLC (high performance liquid
chromatography)

10. Other methods
1- Bioluminer Sensor
• Luciferase enzyme = light
2-Piezoelectric sensor (PZ)
• When analyte bind with biosensor, it cause
increase in size which in turn cause decrease
in oscillation
3- Antibody-based Biosensor:
• Mixture

11. Herbicide and pesticide detection
• We use chromatographic techniques
1- MRM (multi residue method)
• For wide range of pesticides
2- Selective MRMs:
• For closed range of pesticides

12. Chelating proteins
• Heavy metal sensors
• To check the heavy metals like copper,
cadmium, zinc and mercury
• 92% sold biosensors for medical purpose
• 6% biosensors used for food detection