In the post-Covid era, ensuring food safety is of paramount importance. It is essential to wash vegetables and fruits properly before consumption, and this has been emphasized many times over the past two years. Recently, World Food Safety Day was celebrated by the World Health Organization (WHO) on June 7 to emphasize the importance of eating healthy, safe and free of chemicals, while also contribute to the prevention of food-borne diseases. And now, technological innovation is aimed at addressing food safety concerns, especially for fresh produce. Researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet have invented a small sensor that could be useful in detecting pesticides on fruit.
The researchers published their findings in the academic journal ‘Advanced Science’. Nanosensors are still at an early stage but could help detect pesticides in food before consumption. The idea of the invention is to enable local stores and supermarkets to detect harmful chemicals in the products they are selling before it causes harm to human health. These nanosensors using a 1970 discovery called Surface-enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) have been used in a number of fields other than food. They used flame spray technique to deposit nanoparticles on the glass surface, thus enhancing the chemical signal and identifying the presence of pesticides within minutes.
(Read more: Students invent ‘edible tape’ to keep fillings intact)
Pesticides can be extremely harmful to human health.
Georgios Sotiriou, principal investigator in the Department of Microbiology, Tumors and Cells, Karolinska Institutet, said: “Reports show that up to half of the fruit sold in the EU contains pesticide residues of varying amounts. Larger amounts are associated with human health problems. and the corresponding author of the study.
“Our sensor can detect pesticide residues on the surface of apples as short as 5 minutes without damaging the fruit,” said a postdoctoral researcher in Sotiriou’s lab and first author of the study, Haipeng Li, said. He added: “While they need to be confirmed in larger studies, we provide a proof-of-concept practical application for large-scale food safety testing prior to consumption.
