Simultaneous detection of eight food allergens using optical thin-film biosensor chips

Food allergies are important food safety issues nowadays. To maintain the safety of people who experience allergic reactions, labeling is required in many countries and efficient and reliable detection methods are necessary. This paper reports a novel method for the rapid identification of food allergens through the use of a silicon-based optical thin-film biosensor chip with which color change results can be perceived by the naked eye without any extra equipment. The whole system can detect eight food allergens including soybean, wheat, peanut, cashew, shrimp, fish, beef, and chicken simultaneously. Sensitive and specific detection of the absolute detection limit of this method was 0.5 pg of cashew DNA, and the practical detection limit of 0.001%. The biosensor chip detection time was about 30 min after PCR amplification. The assay is proposed as a sensitive, specific, high-throughput, and ready-to-use analytical tool to detect the presence or confirm the absence of eight food allergens.