Development of polydiacetylene-gold nanostar-based biosensor for food spoilage monitoring

The consumption of unsafe food or spoilage food is one of the worldwide problems in the present. One of the key factors making food spoilage is the synthesized biogenic amines by the contamination of bacteria, viruses, or parasites. These chemicals become a cause of several diseases in humans including inflammation, difficulty breathing, hypertension, cancer, and death.

The detection of biogenic amines in food samples is one of the techniques to monitor food spoilage. However, the current techniques require highly analytical equipment and specialists and need to be conducted at the laboratory, thereby, becoming a limitation for common people who cannot monitor or check food spoilage by themselves.

From this problem, this research project aims to develop a user-friendly sensor to monitor food spoilage that has high sensitivity and can be used outside the laboratory. We planned to incorporate polydiacetylene with gold nanostar which can change its color upon reaction with any outer stimulants such as volatile chemicals, temperature changes, and pH. In brief, upon reacting with biogenic amines, the PDA-gold nanostar complex is expected to change its color from blue to red and the intensity of the color depends on the amount of detected biogenic amines. From this, we expect that PDA-gold nanostar complex-based biosensors could be an alternative effective detector for food spoilage in the future.