Background

Food safety management and guarantee are the basic requirement during food processing, circulation, storage, and marketing. Elevating the ability to evaluate food quality and safety in a rapid, sensitive and reliable manner is of great importance in food industry. Recently, gold nanoparticles due to unique optical property, ease of functionalization and preparation, and high selectivity and sensitivity have received considerable attention in the field of food safety.

Scope and approach

Gold nanoparticles exhibit distinguishable optical characteristic in different aggregated states and thus have been developed into simple colorimetric sensors for the quick detection of chemical contaminants in food samples. Herein, we reviewed the current methods for synthesis and functionalization of gold nanoparticles, strategies for fabrication of gold nanoparticle based colorimetric sensors and their applications in rapid analysis of food contaminant. Moreover, the inherent optical property of gold nanoparticles and their detecting principle have been highlighted. Finally, the main challenges and future efforts in developing such colorimetric sensors for food contaminants detection were discussed.

Key findings and conclusions

Gold nanoparticles as smart colorimetric sensors conform to the requirement of modern analysis, such as high selectivity, sensitivity, simplicity, celerity, and portability. Thus, they have great potential to be applied as power sensing tools for food safety screening.

中文翻译：

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金纳米颗粒：从合成，性质到作为比色传感器在食品安全筛选中的潜在应用

背景

食品安全管理和保证是食品加工，流通，储存和销售的基本要求。在食品工业中，以快速，敏感和可靠的方式提高评估食品质量和安全性的能力非常重要。近来，金纳米颗粒由于其独特的光学性质，易于官能化和制备以及高选择性和灵敏度而在食品安全领域中引起了相当大的关注。

范围和方法

金纳米颗粒在不同的聚集状态下表现出独特的光学特性，因此已发展成为用于快速检测食品样品中化学污染物的简单比色传感器。在这里，我们审查了金纳米粒子的合成和功能化的当前方法，基于金纳米粒子的比色传感器的制造策略及其在食品污染物快速分析中的应用。此外，金纳米颗粒的固有光学性质及其检测原理也得到了强调。最后，讨论了开发用于食品污染物检测的比色传感器的主要挑战和未来的努力。

主要发现和结论

金纳米颗粒作为智能比色传感器，符合现代分析的要求，例如高选择性，灵敏度，简单性，快速性和便携性。因此，它们具有巨大的潜力，可以用作食品安全筛查的功率传感工具。