Quartz Crystal Microbalance Based Approach for Food Quality

To overcome food borne illness, food quality and safety are major scientific disciplines including food handling, preparation and storage. Detection of contaminants in the food system is the main concern regarding public health. It is necessary to develop an immunoassay system to detect and control food borne pathogens in contaminated foods before they enter into the human food chain and cause infections. The conventional methods including agar plating, chromatography or immunoassay are tedious and time consuming for detection of food contamination, while biosensors are one option to overcome these problems. There is growing interest towards biosensors technology due to high specificity, convenience and quick response. In the field of food science and technology, biosensors technology for the detection of food borne pathogens is more fascinating to the current researchers. In this contest we introduce, quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) a label free and piezoelectric biosensor for the detection of pathogenic microbes and toxins present in the food. The potential significance of the present review is to provide the implementation of QCM based biosensor for the detection of various analytes in food systems including toxic and nontoxic.