Food safety and quality assessment: comprehensive review and recent trends in the applications of ion mobility spectrometry (IMS)

Abstract

Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is an analytical separation and diagnostic technique that is simple and sensitive and a rapid response and low-priced technique for detecting trace levels of chemical compounds in different matrices. Chemical agents and environmental contaminants are successfully detected by IMS and have been recently considered to employ in food safety. In addition, IMS uses stand-alone or coupled analytical diagnostic tools with chromatographic and spectroscopic methods. Scientific publications show that IMS has been applied 21% in the pharmaceutical industry, 9% in environmental studies and 13% in quality control and food safety. Nevertheless, applications of IMS in food safety and quality analysis have not been adequately explored. This review presents the IMS-related analysis and focuses on the application of IMS in food safety and quality. This review presents the important topics including detection of traces of chemicals, rate of food spoilage and freshness, food adulteration and authenticity as well as natural toxins, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, veterinary, and growth promoter drug residues. Further, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), acrylamide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH), biogenic amines, nitrosamine, furfural, phenolic compounds, heavy metals, food packaging materials, melamine, and food additives were also examined for the first time. Therefore, it is logical to predict that the application of the IMS technique in food safety, food quality, and contaminant analysis will be impressively increased in the future.

Highlights

• Current status of IMS for residues and contaminant detection in food safety.

• To assess all the detected contaminants in food safety, for the first time.

• Identified IMS-related parameters and chemical compounds in food safety control.

Keywords:

• Analysis
• contamination
• food
• ion mobility spectrometry
• residue
• safety
• toxin

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr. Mahdi Kadivar and Dr. Arash Bahrami for significant suggestions in improving this article. Also, Dr. Bahman Farnudi and Dr. Hossein Sadeghi for editing the paper.

Disclosure statement

Authors have no conflict of interest.