Biosensors to support sustainable agriculture and food safety

Food safety affects everyone worldwide and will remain a global challenge to human health in the foreseeable future requiring the rapid, sensitive, efficient and inexpensive detection of food contaminants. Biosensors have long been investigated to be part of a solution. In fact, current research trends of nanoscale science and technology, efforts of miniaturization and connectivity enabled through the internet of things boost biosensors' capabilities to a degree that they surely will play a major part of the answer to this global challenge. Surprisingly though, the adaption of such biosensors to function along the entire food value chain and hence also include important aspects of sustainable agriculture and food fraud has been neglected so far. In this review, the latest developments of biosensors addressing these issues are presented for the years 2015-2019 and point toward important new strategies needed to truly ensure safe food in a sustainable global market. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.