Illuminating the path: aggregation-induced emission for food contaminants detection

AbstractFood safety is a global concern that deeply affects human health. To ensure the profitability of the food industry and consumer safety, there is an urgent need to develop rapid, sensitive, accurate, and cost-effective detection methods for food contaminants. Recently, the Aggregation-Induced Emission (AIE) has been successfully used to detect food contaminants. AIEgens, fluorescent dyes that cause AIE, have several valuable properties including high quantum yields, photostability, and large Stokes shifts. This review provides a detailed introduction to the principles and advantages of AIE-triggered detection, followed by a focus on the past five years’ applications of AIE in detecting various food contaminants including pesticides, veterinary drugs, mycotoxins, food additives, ions, pathogens, and biogenic amines. Each detection principle and component is comprehensively covered and explained. Moreover, the similarities and differences among different types of food contaminants are summarized, aiming to inspire future researchers. Finally, this review concludes with a discussion of the prospects for incorporating AIEgens more effectively into the detection of food contaminants.Keywords: Aggregation-induced emissionfood contaminantsdetectionfluorescencesensing mechanism Disclosure statementThe authors declare no conflict of interest.Additional informationFundingThe work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant [No. 32102067], the Hainan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant [No. 320RC509 and No. 323QN251], the Key Laboratory of Tropical Fruits and Vegetables Quality and Safety for State Market Regulation under Grant [No. ZX-2023001], and the Education Department of Hainan Province under Grant [No. Hnky2023-74].