Hydrogel-integrated sensors for food safety and quality monitoring: Fabrication strategies and emerging applications

Abstract

Food safety is a global issue in public hygiene. The accurate, sensitive, and on-site detection of various food contaminants performs significant implications. However, traditional methods suffer from the time-consuming and professional operation, restricting their on-site application. Hydrogels with the merits of highly porous structure, high biocompatibility, good shape-adaptability, and stimuli-responsiveness offer a promising biomaterial to design sensors for ensuring food safety. This review describes the emerging applications of hydrogel-based sensors in food safety inspection in recent years. In particular, this study elaborates on their fabrication strategies and unique sensing mechanisms depending on whether the hydrogel is stimuli-responsive or not. Stimuli-responsive hydrogels can be integrated with various functional ligands for sensitive and convenient detection via signal amplification and transduction; while non-stimuli-responsive hydrogels are mainly used as solid-state encapsulating carriers for signal probe, nanomaterial, or cell and as conductive media. In addition, their existing challenges, future perspectives, and application prospects are discussed. These practices greatly enrich the application scenarios and improve the detection performance of hydrogel-based sensors in food safety detection.

Keywords:

• Polymer hydrogel
• DNA hydrogel
• stimuli-responsive
• encapsulating carrier
• conductive medium

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFF1103000); National Natural Science Foundation of China (32072310 and 32272449); Jiangsu Agriculture Science and Technology Innovation Fund (CX(22)3006); Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (JUSRP622025); Collaborative Innovation Center of Food Safety and Quality Control in Jiangsu Province.