Development of Electrochemical Biosensor for The Detection of Borne Pathogens

Abstract

Food-borne pathogens such bacteria, viruses, or parasites as well as toxins frequently cause fatal diseases resulting from the spoilage of contaminated food. These diseases usually arise from improper handling, preparation and storage of food. Food-borne diseases are public health concern globally, since the most parasitic or bacterial borne pathogen causing illness or food poisoning, and in severe cases, death. It is observed that the important bacterial agents, which caused these outbreaks, were Staphylococcus aureus, Vibrio Cholarae, Salmonella typhimurium, Escherichia coli and Yersinia enterocolitica. Street food is most commonly implicated in food poisoning outbreaks. A study was performed to assess the food safety and hygiene practices among 200 street food vendors in Delhi, India. The most common known bacterial foodborne pathogens are Salmonella paratyphi and Listeria monocytogenes and cause various diseases due to contaminated food. There are various traditional techniques for the detection of food pathogens such as classical culture and enrichment method but these methods have some setbacks such as lengthy, requires expertise and cumbersome. Molecular and immunological techniques have also some associated drawbacks such as cross reactivity and expensive reagents. There have been many reports on electrochemical detection of food pathogens; but none of these reports focuses on paper based biosensors. All are on metal based electrodes and therefore are expensive in comparison to the cheap paper electrodes. Keeping in view the need of the hour to monitor the presence of Salmonella paratyphi and Listeria Monocytogenes and the various promising nanomaterials which can be employed as potential surface modifiers for it detection, it is proposed to develop nanomaterial modified electrochemical paper-based analytical device for the selective recognition of Salmonella paratyphi and Listeria monocytogenes. newline