ARS | Publication request: Nanotechnology in food quality and safety evaluation systems

Submitted to: Emerging Technologies for Food Quality and Food Safety Inspection
Publication Type: Book / Chapter
Publication Acceptance Date: September 28, 2011
Publication Date: March 9, 2011
Citation: Ko, S., Kim, J., Park, B., Cho, Y. 2011. Nanotechnology in food quality and safety evaluation systems. Emerging Technologies for Food Quality and Food Safety Inspection. p. 376.

Interpretive Summary: Improvement of food safety and quality has been a critical issue globally for several decades. Although traditional methods had played essential roles in evaluating the quality and safety of foods, the sensitivity, specificity, and efficacy of detection is still limited. Also, current trends of increasing demand for raw and minimally processed foods make pathogen reduction difficult and thereby impose new concepts of pathogen detection methods. Recently, nanotechnology aims to detect food hazard and quality parameters. The use of nanotechnology could resolve various technical barriers in evaluating food quality and safety. Nanotechnology is emerging in the development of biosensors. As nanoscale sensing methods significantly increased sensitivity but reduced response-time, nanobiosensors have been designed for early detection of food contaminants even at low concentration. Thus, nanobiosensors could detect food contaminants rapidly, accurately, and selectively. In this paper, we demonstrated food nanotechnology for evaluating food safety as well as quality. Nanotechnology-based quantitative analyses of food pathogens, mycotoxins, chemical contaminants, nutrients and bioactives, are discussed. The nanotechnology for evaluation of shelf-life and sensory characteristics are also summarized. Several examples are introduced for demonstrating the applications of both chemical and biological nanoscale sensing technologies for both food quality and safety evaluations.

Technical Abstract: N/A