Food-borne diseases reported an alarming public morbidity rate, with the onset of food-related health hazards occurring at an erratic and varying point. As a result, food safety is an important public concern in both developed and under developed countries around the world. Therefore, quick detection of foodborne pathogens and the implementation of measures to ensure their detection are of immense significance. Therefore, proper handling and preparation of food is crucial to ensure quality and preserve societal health during food production, manufacturing, packaging, and transportation. Enhanced monitoring of food safety should be more frequent and larger in scale. Immunological, molecular, and cultural methods are frequently used in the detection of foodborne pathogens. High cost, prolonged analysis time, and the necessity of trained personnel are some of the disadvantages of these methods. Current practices are not ideal because of the high cost of routine laboratory examinations, time consuming operations, and trained personnel, which hinder the possibility of more frequent and regular point-of-care testing(POCT). Emerging technologies are gaining fast popularity for use in detecting food contaminants and offer numerous advantages such as being Affordable, Sensitive, Specific, User-friendly, Rapid and Robust, Equipment free, and Deliverable to end users (ASSURED), offering a high prospect as alternatives to the conventional bench top detection technologies. Biosensors are the first building block paving the way for POCT devices.
The success of a biosensor lies in the judicial combination of three critical factors including (i) bio-recongition components (aptamer, enzyme, antibody, DNA etc) (ii) transducing surface and (iii) type of transducer. In the talk we will discuss about developing an aptamer based biosensor for the detection of food borne pathogens (ii) intervention of nanoparticles for amplification of sensing signal and (iii) to validate a proposed system.