CHAPTER 2: Innovative Tools with Miniaturized Devices for Food Biosensing Check Access

Screening for biological and chemical contaminants and monitoring of nutrients are some of the crucial challenges for quality assessment of food and consumer safety. Although conventional techniques provide high specificity and selectivity, these methods are normally time consuming, expensive, need trained staff to carry out the tests in a centralized laboratory, and are not always compatible with all the stages of food production and the distribution chain. To overcome those limitations, a lot of effort has been made recently to develop simple, low-cost, and sensitive miniaturized devices. Thus, in this chapter we present some of the aspects of miniaturized systems used in food biosensing, from the construction of these platforms to application in food analysis, as well as the perspective and future directions of these technologies.