Lingwen Zeng
Wuhan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China
Title: Electrochemical instrument for food safety
Biography
Biography: Lingwen Zeng
Abstract
Food safety has been an increasing public concern worldwide, and rapid detection technologies for contaminants in food and agricultural products are of crucial importance to food safety. In the past few decades, various instruments based on optics, electrochemistry and acoustics have been exploited for food analysis. Despite much progress has been made, many of them are either too expensive, or inconvenient, or inaccurate, or too complicated for operation. Herein, there has been an increasing demand for developing highly efficient, reliable, and cost-effective instruments for rapid and on-line analysis. With this regard, considering simple fabrication, disposability and portability of screen- printed carbon electrodes (SPCEs), we have developed a series detection methods based electrochemistry. First, a portable electrochemical device capable of detecting and identifying heavy metals has been developed. With the square wave pulse anodic stripping voltammetry, this instrument can successfully achieve highly sensitive detection of seven different heavy metals (including copper, lead, zinc, cadmium, chromium, mercury and arsenic) in a variety foods including rice, vegetables, fish. Secondly, pesticide residue analysis in fruit and vegetables have been developed based on acetylcholinesterase (AChE) enzyme modified SPCE. Other work such as detection of illegal additives, animal drug residues and pathogens are also being investigated. It is evident that SPCEs based electrochemical instruments would play a very important role in food safety analysis and environmental monitoring.