Recently, the Meat Science and Nutrition Research Team, Institute of Food Science and Technology (IFST), Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), successfully created a colorimetric-fluorescent dual-signal biosensor for meat freshness detection. The research was published in the top journal  Nano Today  (JCR 1, IF: 17.4).

Food is prone to contamination by external and internal microorganisms throughout various processes, including processing, transportation, storage, and marketing. These microorganisms can decompose proteins to produce volatile amines (VAs), leading to the deterioration of food, as meat is a typical material. Consequently, there is a growing need to develop real-time, cost-effective, and efficient methods for monitoring VAs. A colorimetric-fluorescent dual-signal biosensor was successfully constructed for food freshness detection by synergistically coordinating single-atom iron nanozyme with carbon quantum dots.

The response times of dual-signal biosensor were 6 min and 15 min for colorimetric mode and fluorescent mode, respectively, when exposed to ammonia. The limits of detection for these two modes were 0.9840 ppm and 0.0838 ppm. This dual-signal biosensor could obtain optical signals rapidly by a portable phone-based program, which is suitable for monitoring the freshness of meat.

Professor Dequan Zhang and Associate Professor Xiaochun Zheng are the co-corresponding authors. Guangchun Song, a GSCAAS-LGg PhD student and Zedong Zhang, a PhD student in the Department of Chemistry at Tsinghua University are the co-first authors. This study was financially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2022YFD2100500).

Portable visualization of colorimetric-fluorescent biosensor for detection applications

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nantod.2023.102025