Recent advances in detection of aflatoxins using carbon dots: A review

Aflatoxins are extremely harmful and cancer-causing substances generated by specific fungi that can contaminate various agricultural products, posing serious health risks to humans, food safety, and animals. Due to their high liposolubility, aflatoxins are readily absorbed into the bloodstream through the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts. Given their resilience and widespread occurrence, aflatoxins continue to be a global concern, necessitating continuous monitoring and the development of innovative detection methods to protect public health and ensure food security. The emergence of carbon dots (CDs) presents a promising avenue for rapidly detecting aflatoxins. CDs offer numerous advantages, including negligible cytotoxicity, water solubility, biocompatibility, chemical stability, efficient light absorption, and exceptional photoinduced electron transfer. Despite these benefits the literature contains some novel reports on using CDs for aflatoxin detection, but lacks a review article. Therefore, this review article explores novel, and emerging detection methods for aflatoxins, such as colorimetric, fluorometric, electrochemical, and electrogenerated chemiluminescence techniques, focusing on the use of modified and unmodified CDs. It also demonstrates how multi-recognition elements are combined with CDs to improve selectivity, sensitivity, and stability for aflatoxin detection. Finally, challenges and limitations for future CDs implementation in real-world assays are discussed.