Insight into the principles and advanced construction strategies of nanoprobe based multi-targets sensing in food safety.

In real-world food safety incidents, hazards are often diverse and coexist simultaneously. Mature single-target detection technologies, while effective, are insufficient for comprehensively evaluating the overall quality and safety of food. As a result, multi-target detection, which enables a more comprehensive assessment of multiple hazards in food, has emerged as a prominent research focus. Nanomaterials have gained significant attention in sensing technologies due to their unique advantages, such as high sensitivity and potential for point-of-care detection. Furthermore, nanomaterials hold great promise for multi-target detection technologies because of their versatile properties, including fluorescence and other characteristics that make them suitable for developing a wide range of detection methods. On the basis of systematically summarizing the research achievements of multi-targets sensing in recent five years, this paper categorizes multi-targets sensing nanoprobes construction strategies into five types according to recognition/interaction relationships between the sensing units and targets. In addition, this review also elaborates some practical cases to further explain the design strategy, detection process and detection system of multi-targets sensing nanoprobes, which provides a novel and directional guidance for food detection and food industry management. Finally, according to the shortcomings of current multi-targets sensing nanoprobes, the prospect and challenges of multi-targets sensing nanoprobes are given.