The expanding human population, the preservation of clean resources and food quality, and the protection of the climate and environment all pose significant challenges to current food production. To attain the goal of regional and global food security, technical progress in processing food, quality assurance, disaster management identification tags, diagnosis, and prevention are highly required. Ensuring food sustainability is largely a collaborative effort that includes both government and private sector technology development. Several attempts have been made to address these difficulties and improve the drivers of food production. Advanced portable, real-time, low-cost technologies are being sought in agriculture to improve consumer livelihood and resource utilization. As a result, there is an increasing demand for biosensing technology in the field of food sustainability. Through molecular recognition materials, antigen-antibody interactions, and subsequent transmission mechanisms, recent advances in biosensing technologies and materials science have played a critical role in understanding agricultural process dynamics. Biosensors are used in clinical, environmental, agricultural, and food analyses, among other biological domains. The stability, affordability, sensitivity, and repeatability of a biosensor are all important factors in its performance. Nanomaterials, with their biosensing technology, are regarded as the most promising instruments for addressing the health, energy, and environmental challenges that affect global populations. Hence, this study will summarize the role of biosensing in food processing, production, security, waste processing, packaging, and engineering.
Our ability to survive and live together with the production of food is crucial to the planet’s ability to support ongoing human population expansion. The rapid growth in population, preservation of healthy resources and food quality, and climate and environmental protection all pose significant difficulties to current food production processes. These difficulties are caused by a variety of factors, some of which are tied to the food manufacturing industry itself. The development of technology that can ensure food safety has mostly been the product of collaboration between businesses and governments. Blockchain technology, for example, will speed up communication between the media, consumers, and food quality, posing new problems in the area of food safety. A precondition for the development of agriculture is developed infrastructures, like information technology, irrigation sector, energy resources, and transportation. Technical advancements, such as the adoption of new technologies and financial investments in research and development also contribute to the expansion and economic adaptability of the food production sector.
Biosensors are currently rising in popularity across all industries from the farm to fork, as they are one of the new and innovative trends and streams in agriculture. A biosensor is defined as a self-contained integrated tool for material sensing and characterization. Biosensor development has gone through a number of stages. Initially distinct from previous generations, transducers and biocatalysts later became so intimately interwoven that removing one would impair the performance of the other. There is no longer a requirement for a mediator in current biosensors. The enzyme is directly decreased on the electrode surface in this form of biosensor.
A biosensor is essentially an analytical tool used to measure a target molecule in a sample. A biorecognition component (e.g., aptamer, antibody, or enzyme) that is particular to the target is usually included. A physiochemical or biological signal is produced when a molecular recognition event occurs between the recognition element and the target substance. The signal is then transformed into a quantifiable amount by the transducer. Signals can be shown in electrical (e.g., voltammetry, impedance, or capacitance), optical (e.g., colorimetric, fluorescence, chemiluminescence, and surface plasmon resonance), or different chosen formats.
There are five major obstacles to the sustainability of food production: 1) the production challenge regarding food security and safety; 2) the quality challenge regarding food diversity and qualities; 3) the economic challenge regarding the regulation of the food system, including its packaging and supply chain; 4) the environmental challenge regarding the processing of food waste; and 5) the engineering challenge regarding the creation and generation of novel foods. All five of the aforementioned key concerns are being addressed by the rising need for biosensing technologies. New energy sources are one of the problems, as the current reliance on fossil fuels has limited their availability and has negative environmental effects. Bioelectrochemical systems (BES) are emerging in research on sustainable electricity sources, chemical manufacturing, resource recovery, and waste remediation to address the energy dilemma. These unusual systems use bacteria as catalysts sourced from organic waste, such as lignocellulosic biomass and low-strength wastewater, which can be converted in both directions between chemical energy and electrical energy. These systems can be created to generate electrical energy that can be utilized to remove resistant substances, recover metals and nutrients, or make hydrogen, caustic substances, and peroxide.
The use of technology in agriculture has opened up new avenues for achieving global food sustainability. The farming industry is quick to adopt user-friendly technologies. For the entire agricultural community (farmers, researchers, and end-users), biosensors have created a new entry point into precision and smart agriculture. Depending on the sort of biorecognition system being used, agricultural biosensors can be categorized. Antibody-antigen, enzyme-coenzyme substrate, and complementary nucleic acid sequences are frequently used in biorecognition systems. Microorganisms, plants, animals, and human tissue can all be used as biorecognition components. According to the signal transduction method, biosensors can be categorized as electrochemical, optical, piezoelectric, or magnetic. Analytical chemistry, which plays a quality control role in food analysis, is a field pioneering the growing applications of nanomaterials in biosensing. Because it guarantees that product attributes and safety are acceptable to consumers, quality control is important in food and beverage monitoring. Chemical analysis can keep track of the quality of food and drink to ensure their composition, structure, nutrition, and microbial traits. Chemical analysis’s specificity, sensitivity, and detection limits are improved by the addition of nanomaterials, enabling femtomolar-level detection. Using biosensor technology, they provide rapid pathogen detection in agriculture. Compared to more established technologies, such as electrochemical, fluorescence, ultraviolet (UV)–Vis, and high-performance liquid chromatography, nanomaterial-based biosensors are thought to be cutting-edge devices with speedier, simpler, and less expensive solutions (e.g., HPLC). To prevent food from becoming damaged by microorganisms and toxins, nanodiamonds may be employed as biosensors and food additives in packaging. Nanodiamond particles in food packaging have been demonstrated to enhance flexibility, durability, and resistance to humidity, temperature change, and possibly also improve anaerobic and antibacterial conditions. The main issues with nanotechnology and food packaging are their potential negative impacts on human health, their immediate and long-term effects on the environment, and the lack of rules and regulations specifically addressing nanomaterials.
Contamination of food is a major concern for health worldwide. The contamination can occur in several ways. Whereas the physical contamination is considered as one of the major concerns in which the presence of higher amount of metallic compound, i,e iron Zn, mercury, lead in food product can highly affect the health. Therefore, it’s important to detect this contamination. Biosensors have been created for managing and accessing food quality. For instance, a biosensor that can detect harmful substances has been developed with pendant anthracene units and an on-off or off-on feature based on water-soluble biocompatible oligoaziridine. Recently, one nanocomposite for numerous applications including glucose sensor, antibacterial and dye degradation. Gold nanoparticles based biosensors have been utilized in designing biosensors for the detection of numerous contaminants and allergens (Z Hua et al., 2021). Another research finding has designed a gold nanoparticles-based biosensor for the detection of foodborne pathogen in a cost-effective manner. Biosensors based on graphene- for on-site detection of different food contaminants has been studied by (Iva et, al 2018). The article reviewed different methods and applications graphene and carbon bases biosensors for the detection chemical contaminants in food products. Our research group recently also investigated the use of metal oxide nanocomposite based on Novel Copper-Zinc-Manganese Ternary as a Heterogeneous Catalyst the detection of Glucose and Antibacterial Activity (Alam et al 2022).
Sustainable food production has made extensive use of biosensors with electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. Other cutting-edge biosensors concentrate on potent adjustable features that may be turned on or off in response to an external signal. A revolutionary analytical method for food analysis is the integration of electrochemical microfluidic and cell culture technologies. The application of nanotechnology to numerous industries has greatly increased in prevalence since it first appeared in agriculture. These industries include those that produce food, protect crops, detect pathogens and toxins, purify water, package food, treat wastewater, and restore the environment.
In summary, the three main areas where food sustainability faces obstacles are the application of nanomaterials in sustainable agriculture, energy sustainability issues, and the marketing of sustainable technology. The safety of a biosensor for human health is a key component in determining its future; therefore, only biosensors and related technologies with little or no negative effects on human health will find commercial success. While it is crucial to consider the pressing requirements to ensure the quality and safety of food when developing a biosensor for food production sustainability, it is also vitally important to ensure that the biosensor itself is safe for humans, as failure to do so would prevent its commercialization.
Finally, I would like to thank Al Bilad Bank Scholarly Chair for Food Security in Saudi Arabia, the Deanship of Scientific Research, Vice Presidency for Graduate Studies and Scientific Research, King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia for supporting this project under project grant No CHAIR69.
Dr. Mir Waqas Alam. Al Bilad Bank Scholarly Chair for Food Security in Saudi Arabia, The Deanship of Scientific Research, The Vice Presidency for Graduate Studies and Scientific Research, and Department of Physics college of science, King Faisal University, Al-Ahsa 31982, Saudi Arabia.
