Optical biosensors have emerged in the past decade as the most promising candidates for portable, highly-sensitive bioanalytical systems that can be employed for in-situ measurements. In this work, a miniaturized optoelectronic system for rapid, quantitative, label-free detection of harmful species in food is presented. The proposed system has four distinctive features that can render to a powerful tool for the next generation of Point-of-Need applications, namely it accommodates the light sources and ten interferometric biosensors on a single silicon chip of a less-than-40mm2 footprint, each sensor can be individually functionalized for a specific target analyte, the encapsulation can be performed at the wafer-scale, and finally it exploits a new operation principle, Broad-band Mach-Zehnder Interferometry to ameliorate its analytical capabilities. Multi-analyte evaluation schemes for the simultaneous detection of harmful contaminants, such as mycotoxins, allergens and pesticides, proved that the proposed system is capable of detecting within short time these substances at concentrations below the limits imposed by regulatory authorities, rendering it to a novel tool for the near-future food safety applications.

© 2016 COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Ioannis Raptis, Konstantinos Misiakos, Eleni Makarona, Alexandros Salapatas, Panagiota Petrou, Sotirios Kakabakos, Athanasios Botsialas, Gerhard Jobst, Willem Haasnoot, Amadeo Fernandez-Alba, Michelle Lees, and Evangelos Valamontes, "A miniaturized optoelectronic system for rapid quantitative label-free detection of harmful species in food," Proc. SPIE 9725, Frontiers in Biological Detection: From Nanosensors to Systems VIII, 97250A (Presented at SPIE BiOS: February 15, 2016; Published: 22 April 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2209077.