Recent Advances of DNA-Templated Metal Nanoclusters for Food Safety Detection: From Synthesis, Applications, Challenges, and Beyond

Food safety concerns have become a significant threat to human health and well-being, catching global attention in recent years. As a result, it is imperative to research conceptually novel biosensing and effective techniques for food matrices detection. Currently, DNA-templated metal nanoclusters (DNA-MNCs) are considered as one of the most promising nanomaterials due to their excellent properties in biosensing. While DNA-MNCs have garnered increasing interest, the reviews of design strategies, applications, and futuristic prospects for biosensing have been hardly found especially in food safety. The synthesis of DNA-MNCs and their use as biosensing materials in food contamination detection, including pathogenic bacteria, toxins, heavy metals, residues of pesticides, and others were comprehensively reviewed. In addition, we summarize the properties of DNA-MNCs briefly and discuss the challenges and future trends. The application of DNA-MNCs powered biosensing has been demonstrated and actively studied, which is a promising paradigm for food safety testing that can supplement or even replace current existing methods. Despite the challenges of difficulty regulating accurately, poor stability, low quantum yield, and difficult commercial transformation, the application prospects of DNA-MNCs biosensors are promising. This review aims to provide insights and directions for the future development of DNA-MNCs based food detection technology.