Fluorescence-Based Bioassays for the Detection and Evaluation of Food Materials

Abstract

We summarize here the recent progress in fluorescence-based bioassays for the detection and evaluation of food materials by focusing on fluorescent dyes used in bioassays and applications of these assays for food safety, quality and efficacy. Fluorescent dyes have been used in various bioassays, such as biosensing, cell assay, energy transfer-based assay, probing, protein/immunological assay and microarray/biochip assay. Among the arrays used in microarray/biochip assay, fluorescence-based microarrays/biochips, such as antibody/protein microarrays, bead/suspension arrays, capillary/sensor arrays, DNA microarrays/polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based arrays, glycan/lectin arrays, immunoassay/enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA)-based arrays, microfluidic chips and tissue arrays, have been developed and used for the assessment of allergy/poisoning/toxicity, contamination and efficacy/mechanism, and quality control/safety. DNA microarray assays have been used widely for food safety and quality as well as searches for active components. DNA microarray-based gene expression profiling may be useful for such purposes due to its advantages in the evaluation of pathway-based intracellular signaling in response to food materials.

Plant Pest Detection Using an Artificial Nose System: A Review

“…To address these challenges, diverse methods or technologies have been developed, which can be divided into two methods: direct and indirect. Direct detection methods include molecular technologies, including polymerase chain reaction (PCR), fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH) and serological technologies such as enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Meanwhile, typical indirect methods detect morphological changes, transpiration rate changes and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) profiles, which correspond to the technologies of fluorescence imaging, hyperspectral techniques and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) [ 4 , 5 , 6 ].…”

A Fluorescent Sensor Array Based on Heteroatomic Macrocyclic Fluorophores for the Detection of Polluting Species in Natural Water Samples

“…Among the optical detection techniques, fluorimetry is very attractive since it provides highly selective luminescence evaluation in a tunable emission range. Moreover, the optical chemical sensors based on fluorophores can be combined in sensor arrays and coupled with chemometric approach (Lvova et al, 2014 ), thus permitting the identification and quantitation of various analytes, such as natural water pollutants (Amatori et al, 2012 ; Bazzicalupi et al, 2013 ; Arca et al, 2014 ; Kang et al, 2014 ; Guanais Goncalves et al, 2016 ), toxins (Lvova et al, 2018 ), pesticides (Lei et al, 2016 ), explosives (Bolse et al, 2017 ; Zhu et al, 2017 ), agents hazardous for human skin (Moczko et al, 2016 ), forbidden additives and pathogens in beverages (Tan et al, 2014 ; Nishi et al, 2015 ; Han et al, 2016 ) and in foodstuffs (Lvova et al, 2015 ; Mungkarndee et al, 2015 , 2016 ).…”

Assessment of food toxicology

“…Cell-specific biomarkers on gene, protein or metabolite levels can be measured by toxicogenomics, toxicoproteonomics or toxicometabonomics, respectively [6,27,[35][36][37][38][39][40]. The integration of food toxicology data obtained via in vitro biochemical, cell-based, in vivo animal models and in silico systems have led to a mechanistic knowledge of systemic or organ-specific toxicity in humans and the identification and use of specific surrogate biomarkers in clinical settings.…”