Microbial Biosensors for Rapid and Accurate Food Quality Monitoring: Detection of Contaminants, Pathogens, and Spoilage Indicators

Ensuring food quality and safety is a global priority due to increasing concerns over contamination, spoilage, and foodborne illnesses. Traditional methods for monitoring food quality are frequently tedious, time-consuming, and not sensitive enough to detect trace amounts of contaminants. Microbial biosensors provide speedy, specific, and sensitive alternatives by employing enzymes, antibodies, or genetically engineered microbial cells as the recognition elements coupled with optical, electrochemical, or thermal transducers. These biosensors employ biological recognition elements such as enzymes, antibodies, or genetically engineered microbial cells coupled with transducers like electrochemical, optical, or thermal systems to detect target analytes. The major advancements in sensor miniaturization, real-time analysis, and on-site applications are highlighted. While biosensors offer unmistakable benefits in food safety and quality control, stability, matrix interference, and scalability remain issues. Future prospects involve nanotechnology-based stabilization and machine learning-based signal processing to surmount present limitations. This review offers a critical overview of the challenges and opportunities in transferring microbial biosensor technology from the laboratory to the industry.