Micro/nanomotor technology: the new era for food safety control

Abstract

Food poisoning caused by eating contaminated food remains a threat to global public health. Making the situation even worse is the aggravated global environmental pollution, which poses a major threat to the safety of agricultural resources. Food adulteration has been rampant owing to negligent national food safety regulations. The speed at which contaminated food is detected and disposed of determines the extent to which consumers’ lives are safeguarded and agricultural economic losses are prevented. Micro/nanomotors offer a high-speed mobile loading platform that substantially increases the chemical reaction rates and, accordingly, exhibit great potential as alternatives to conventional detection and degradation techniques. This review summarizes the propulsion modes applicable to micro/nanomotors in food systems and the advantages of using micro/nanomotors, highlighting examples of their potential use in recent years for the detection and removal of food contaminants. Micro/nanomotors are an emerging technology for food applications that is moving toward mass production, simple preparation, and important functions.

Keywords:

• Nanotechnology
• micro/nanomotor
• food safety control
• decontamination
• detection

Author contributions

Jie Dan and Shuo Shi contributed equally to this manuscript. Jie Dan and Shuo Shi contributed to the earlier draft of the manuscript. Hao Sun, Zehui Su and Yanmin Liang revised and edited the manuscript. Jianlong Wang provided laboratory resources. Wentao Zhang conceived and designed the review.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Funding

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation of China under Grant [31901794, 21675127], the National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talents under Grant [BX20180263], the Young Talent Fund of University Association for Science and Technology in Shaanxi, China under Grant [2019-02-03], the Key Research and Development Program of Shaanxi Province under Grant [2019NY-111], and the Tang Scholar by Cyrus Tang Foundation.