Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) based chemosensors/biosensors for analysis of food contaminants

Background As a critical topic of international concern, food safety has received great attention in recent years. The hazardous substances (such as antibiotics, heavy metal ions, food additives, and foodborne bacteria) in foodstuffs would cause threat to human health and economic losses in food industry. Despite of high sensitivity, accuracy, and reliability of conventional techniques for analysis of food contaminants, they often require complicated apparatus, well-trained personalized operation, and laborious and time-consuming procedure. In this regard, new sensing strategies for convenient, fast, and sensitive detection of food contaminants should be developed for food safety. Scope and approach Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), as a large category of porous crystalline materials, could be used as efficient platforms for constructing diverse chemosensors and biosensors, for their high porosity, adjustable compositions or structures, and good stability. A variety of MOFs, MOFs-based composites, and MOFs-based derivatives show excellent fluorescence (FL), chemical functionality, and strong bioaffinity toward probes (DNA, aptamers, or antibodies), exhibiting great potentials as FL emitters, electrode materials, or platforms of biosensors for selective and sensitive detection of hazard analytes in foodstuffs. By coupling with different determination techniques such as FL, electrochemical (EC), photoelectrochemical (PEC) or surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy methods, MOFs-based materials have shown promising applications for detecting diverse analytes. Furthermore, the current challenges and future developments of MOFs-based materials for analysis of food contaminants have been discussed. Key findings and conclusions Although some reviews on the applications of MOFs in food packing and food safety have been documented, this comprehensive review will provide new insights to the construction of chemosensors and biosensors with MOFs-based materials for determination of food contaminants toward food safety monitoring.