Ensuring seafood safe to spoon: a brief review of biosensors for marine biotoxin monitoring

Abstract

With harmful algal blooms, marine food poisoning caused by marine biotoxins frequently occurs and is life-threatening if severe. However, the conventional detection methods of marine toxins have a few limitations: low sensitivity and high-cost. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a fast and sensitive on-site detection method for real seafood sample. Biosensors based on aptamers, antibodies, and cells have been applied in marine toxins monitoring. This review presents the classification and toxic effects of marine toxins, and recent biosensor for marine toxin detection. In addition, we have compared the superiority and limitation of these biosensors. Finally, challenges and opportunities of biosensors in food safety detection were discussed. Considering the excellent results achieved by the aptasensor in the field of detection, it seems ready to be put into practical applications.

Keywords:

• aptasensor
• cell-based biosensor
• food safety monitoring
• immunosensor
• marine toxins

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Breeding Plan of Shandong Provincial Qingchuang Research Team (2019), National Key Research and Development Program under Grant No. 2016YFD0400105, China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant No. 2019M652320, and National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 81703228.