Visual detection technologies for mycotoxins in food products: recent advances, current challenges, and future...

Food products are highly vulnerable to fungal contamination throughout storage, transportation, and processing, leading to the accumulation of mycotoxins that pose significant risks to food safety and public health. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop sensitive, rapid, and reliable detection tools. Visual detection enables real-time monitoring of mycotoxin contamination using miniaturized equipment, offering advantages such as simple operation, user-friendliness, fast detection speed, and high sensitivity. As a result, it has gained increasing favor among researchers and practitioners across various fields. This review summarizes recent advances in visual detection methods for mycotoxins, including colorimetric, fluorescent, electrochemiluminescent, and photoelectrochromic visualization approaches. For each category, the design principles, representative applications, key advantages, and inherent limitations are systematically analyzed. Finally, the key scientific and technological challenges currently facing this field are critically examined, and the emerging opportunities arising from the integration of visual biosensing with big data analytics and machine learning are highlighted. This review is intended to serve as a valuable reference for the development of novel visual biosensors for mycotoxin detection and for the broader application of next-generation visual biosensors in on-site mycotoxin monitoring.