Sensing technology empowering food safety: research progress of SERS-assisted multimodal biosensing toward food hazard factors

Food is the main source of human energy and nutrition, but once it is contaminated with hazardous factors, such as biotoxins, pesticide residues, etc., it will seriously damage health. This paper reviews the research progress of biosensors based on surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) in the detection of food hazard factors. First, the basic principle, substrate and assay mode of SERS technology, as well as related design and sensing strategy mechanisms, are introduced. Then, the design idea of multimodal biosensors combining SERS with microfluidic, fluorescence, colorimetric, electrochemical (EC), molecular imprinting and other technologies is expounded to improve the analysis accuracy and specificity. Then the application results of multimodal biosensors based on SERS sensing toward food hazard factors are discussed, and the necessity of its development is illustrated. Finally, the future development direction of this field is prospected, which provides a reference for promoting the research and application of multimodal biosensors based on SERS.