View Project

The objective of the propsosla is to analyse and understand the role of various mechanisms of the food adulteration and food spoilage and to develop methods for the efficient detection of food adulterants such as Aflatoxins, Bis Phenol A, Pesticides etc using different transduction techniques (electrochemical and optical) offering potent tools to evaluate the quality and specifically the safety of different types of agricultural produce and processed food samples  by multifold enhancement of biosensing characteristics.

• To  study Agricultural challenges, food processing challenges and biosensor technology interventions
• To fabricate biosensor based on electrochemical and optical transducers for detection of Aflatoxins, Bis Phenol A, insecticides and pestcides etc.
• To evaluate biosensor performance in respect of sensitivity, limit of detection, interferences, shelf life and reproducibility
• To validate biosensor results in real samples and with other techniques
• Development of Point of care diagnostics for the agricultural produce and food toxins

Foodborne illness is one of the significant worldwide issues which conclusively shows their several adverse impacts, especially on travel, trade, and development. The primary cause of the foodborne illness is the consumption of food that contained unhealthy microorganisms includes infectious bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungus, and non-infectious chemicals or toxins. This problem is still not under control, and outbreaks can cause an economic loss of billions of dollars. It has been estimated that globally, around 48 million people suffer, and about 0.12 million are admitted to hospital every year. There are many ways to exist that infect various food and agricultural varieties, which could be biological, physical, and chemical.

                  Most common toxin which is present in a wide variety of food and feedstuffs is Mycotoxin, a secondary metabolite produced by the fungus, found in most of the agricultural commodities such as in coffee, cereals, wine, maize, corns, groundnuts, rice, meat, flour, almonds, etc. Other causes  It shows acute and chronic diseases such as hepatitis B, the proliferation of bile duct, edema, anorexia, malaise, reduced kidney function, lethargy, liver cancer, kidney damage, and death.

Foodborne illness is one of the significant worldwide issues which conclusively shows their several adverse impacts, especially on travel, trade, and development. The primary cause of the foodborne illness is the consumption of food that contained unhealthy microorganisms includes infectious bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungus, and non-infectious chemicals or toxins. This problem is still not under control, and outbreaks can cause an economic loss of billions of dollars. It has been estimated that globally, around 48 million people suffer, and about 0.12 million are admitted to hospital every year. There are many ways to exist that infect various food and agricultural varieties, which could be biological, physical, and chemical.

Most common toxin which is present in a wide variety of food and feedstuffs is Mycotoxin, a secondary metabolite produced by the fungus, found in most of the agricultural commodities such as in coffee, cereals, wine, maize, corns, groundnuts, rice, meat, flour, almonds, etc.. Regional, seasonal, and year-to-year climate variability, global warming also strongly affects agricultural food production, especially in some particular regions such as tropical and subtropic areas of the world. Storage of mycotoxins is categorized into two parts, one is field fungi that produce in the field known as pre-harvest, and other is storage fungi typically occur after harvest known as post-harvest. During pre-harvesting and harvesting, few factors such as temperature, gas composition, pH, chemical additives, moisture, water stress, insect damage, etc. affect the rapid growth of fungal infection that leads to producing Aflatoxin in food crops. During the rainy season, unusually hot and dry conditions also responsible for the growth of Aspergillus and Paramecium species, which continue to grow and produce till the transport and storage take place. It shows acute and chronic diseases such as hepatitis B, the proliferation of bile duct, edema, anorexia, malaise, reduced kidney function, lethargy, liver cancer, kidney damage, and death.

Therefore, we propose to fabricate indigenous biosensors using Optical, Electrochemical and liquid crystal transduction mechanisms which can quickly detect food toxins, food additives, pesticide and antibiotic residues, microbes and biotoxins, which are  point of care, affordable, rapid with high sensitivity and specificity.

(1) Knowledge base for checking the food quality and agricultural produce

(2)  POC device for the checking of Food quality

The technology has lots of impact on the measurement of food quality and on the overall health and wellbeing of the Nation