Research Progress of Optical Aptasensors Based on AuNPs in Food Safety

In recent years, food safety issues have become more serious, which caused extensive study on various methods for detecting food hazards. Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) have drawn significant attention in nanoscience for the construction of biosensors because of their good biocompatibility, excellent quenching effect, unique surface plasmon resonance (SPR) properties, and high surface-to-volume ratio. Owing to the rapidly increasing demand for technologies, aptamers have widely emerged as biorecognition elements which can bind to targets with high specificity and affinity. Several AuNPs and aptamer-based biosensors have been developed for the detection of different molecules. In this review, we mainly introduce the principles and applications in food hazards detection of optical biosensors, including colorimetric aptasensor, fluorescence aptasensor, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS)-based aptasensor, and chemiluminescence-based aptasensor. This feature article highlights the recent advances of AuNPs and aptamers for their potential applications of the optical biosensor. Finally, the prospects on improving the convenience of aptamer screening technology and the stability of AuNPs application achieving the combination with other technologies to realize large-scale applications are put forward.