Nanotechnology-leveraged nucleic acid amplification for foodborne pathogen detection

Foodborne pathogen issue threats human health and remains to be a worldwide challenge. Therefore, rapid, sensitive and point-of-care testing technologies are crucial for food safety and human health. Nanomaterial-based nucleic acid assays hold the promise for meeting the requirements of foodborne pathogen detection. Nucleic acid amplification can generate abundant copies of target genes and high specificty for sequence identification, while nanotechnology allows to transfer the gene information to be readable signals for constructing various biosensors. This review presents nanotechnological nucleic acid biosensors for pathogen detection by the category of nucleic acid amplification techniques and nanomaterials including carbon nanomaterials, metal nanomaterials, magnetic nanomaterials and quantum dots, which provides a cutting-edge solution for monitoring food safety. These approaches achieve sensitive detection of foodborne pathogens, and enable qualitative and quantitative analysis in the complex food matrixes, and hold potential for on-site detection. Challenges and potential solutions in this field are discussed, which is expected to inspire innovation on nanomaterial and biotechnical strategies to improve food safety.