Next-generation immuno-biosensors: Transforming foodborne pathogen detection

The persistent threat of foodborne pathogens, despite safety measures, underscores the urgent need for highly sensitive and rapid sensing technologies to prevent outbreaks and mitigate their devastating health and economic impacts. The evolution of sensing technologies, from enzyme-based biosensors to advanced immuno-based methods, highlights a continuous drive to improve sensitivity, speed, and feasibility in pathogen detection. Immuno-based biosensors have revolutionized pathogen detection by advancements in miniaturization, offering swift, sensitive, and cost-effective alternatives to traditional methods. Mainly, two categories of immuno-based biosensors have become largely demanding for POC; signal transduction-based, such as electrochemical, optical, and quartz crystal microbalance technologies, have significantly advanced pathogen detection by offering real-time, hyper-sensitive, and prompt monitoring capabilities, making them promising tools for field-deployable diagnostics. The second category, platform design-based immuno-based biosensors, such as lateral flow assays, microfluidic paper-based devices, and microchip-based devices, offer cost-effective, facile, and precise pathogen detection for use in food safety and outbreak prediction analysis. Nevertheless, numerous other biosensor types exist, but this review will focus on a few selective ones to enhance clarity and readability. The review shall summarize the state-of-the-art advancements in food pathogen sensing by immuno-based biosensors, their effectiveness, progress, and categories. Racing from qualification to quantification, the discussion will cover the challenges encountered and loopholes in the developed immuno-biosensing methodologies, including material-related issues (e.g., batch variability of nanomaterials, single-use paper substrates) and assay design (e.g., complex microfluidic architectures and multi-step protocols) that affect reproducibility, waste generation, and dependence on trained operators. It will reflect on a comparative study between the most recent emerging works based on good linear range, limit of detections (LODs), types of real samples utilized and short detection time for addressing their impact as POC devices. Unlike previous reviews that typically focus on isolated sensing mechanisms, this article provides a comparative analysis of both signal-transduction-based and platform-design-based immuno-biosensors, coupled with emphasis on recent advances relevant to point-of-care food pathogen detection.