Advancing food safety with molecularly imprinted nanozyme-based sensors for detecting food contaminants: A review
Seyed Mohammad Taghi Gharibzahedi, Zeynep Altıntaş
Abstract
Background Food safety assurance requires sensitive, selective detection platforms for harmful contaminants. Integrating nanozymes (NZs) with molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) enhances sensor specificity, stability, and catalytic efficiency, thereby enabling reliable, rapid, and cost-effective assessment of food contamination. Scope and approach This review evaluates the integration of NZs with MIPs for sensor-based food safety monitoring. It addresses the fundamentals of NZs and MIPs, their synergy in promoting sensor responsiveness, and their application in detecting food contaminants such as antibiotics, allergens, pesticides, herbicides, microorganisms, chemotoxins, biotoxins, and heavy metals. Challenges and future directions for improving these sensors are also highlighted. Key findings and conclusions Hybridizing MIPs with NZs improved the detection of food safety risks across different matrices. These sensors successfully detected antibiotic residues in milk, eggs, and meat. MIP-NZ sensors demonstrated high selectivity and sensitivity for food allergens (e.g., histamine, ovalbumin), exhibiting reliable recovery rates in complex food samples, such as soy sauce, vinegar, and fish. They identified pesticides and herbicides in fruits, vegetables, and water at ultra-low detection limits (LODs). MIP-NZ sensors enabled single-cell detection of foodborne pathogens in milk and juice, with very low LODs. These sensors detect biotoxins (e.g., saxitoxin, patulin) and chemical toxins (e.g., bisphenol-A, melamine) in shellfish, apple juice, and milk. Combining MIPs and NZs presented a versatile platform for multi-analyte detection, contributing to the simultaneous surveillance of multiple contaminants in a single food sample. Future research should focus on simplifying sensor fabrication, improving multiplexing capabilities, and strengthening portability for on-site applications in food safety monitoring.