Advances in visual immunoassays for sensitive detection of mycotoxins in food - a review

Mycotoxins are the toxic secondary metabolites naturally produced by fungi, their contamination in agricultural products and food severely threaten food safety and public health worldwide. The reliable, efficient and sensitive quantification of mycotoxins in food have become increasing challenging to tackle due to the complexity of food matrices and their low level. Visual detection has emerged as a popular trend toward miniaturization and simplification of mycotoxins assays yet is constrained with their limited sensitivity. In this review, we mainly focus on the various kinds of the visual immunoassays by utilizing nanomaterials for loading enzyme and nanozyme. These enzymes have been as signal amplification for the improved sensitivity of mycotoxins detection through the various enzymatic catalytic reaction. Besides, the underlying principle and the advantages of the visual immunoassays for mycotoxins have been proposed. And the challenges and perspectives have been proposed to develop improved efficient catalytic detection strategies for mycotoxins in food.