ABSTRACT
Microbes are highly specialized organisms that evolve and adapt to the host environment rapidly. The major cause of the disease outbreaks in the world is due to the transfer of some highly aggressive groups of microbial communities to the contaminated food. There are many conventional and high-throughput analytical techniques available that are very useful for the analysis of food. But some of them lack robustness, sensitivity, specificity for special targets, ingenious procedures, and ephemeral operations. Recently, nanotechnology has been adopted in the food industry to solve this challenge. Biofunctional magnetic nanoparticles, due to their exceptional properties such as electronic, magnetic, optical, catalytic, etc., have been recently applied for potential applications in the food industry. Magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) have attracted the research attention due to their high surface area, high surface-to-volume ratio, multi-ligand loading capacity, multi-analyte detection ability, high charge transfer capability, and ease in separation with the external magnetic field. MNPs have been functionalized with biochemical components to bless them with biofunctional properties.
354The potential applications of biofunctional magnetic nanoparticles have emerged as the advancement in chemical and biochemical separation technology and foodborne pathogen detection sensors. For example, to concentrate the desired toxins in HPLC (High-performance liquid chromatography), ELISA (Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) for toxins detection (peptides or protein), enhanced sensitivity in PCR (Polymerase chain reaction) for pathogen detection, and other applications as immunosensors for food contaminant detection.
