Cutting-Edge Bioanalytical Transducers for Mycotoxin Surveillance: A Review

Mycotoxins derived from fungi pose a serious health threat, contributing significantly to foodborne illnesses and economic losses worldwide. Therefore, effective monitoring of mycotoxins is essential to ensure food safety and meet international regulatory standards. Though conventional analytical techniques like HPLC, GC-MS, and ELISA are very sensitive and offer high specificity, they are time-consuming, expensive, and require sophisticated infrastructure. This triggered the exponential development in the area of biosensors, which integrate various biorecognition elements with the sensor platforms operated by multifarious transduction principles. Despite the proliferation of reviews regarding mycotoxin detection, a unified critical analysis encompassing the full spectrum of rapid detection technologies and discussions related to biorecognition element stability and nanomaterial’s reliability for device translation remain absent. This review bridges these gaps by providing a structured comparative evaluation of state-of-the-art detection technologies, prioritizing key translational metrics, including operational complexity, response time and cost-effectiveness. Beyond standard sensing modalities, it critically examines the synergistic integration of microfluidic automation and machine learning algorithms, highlighting their pivotal roles in enhancing analytical robustness and mitigating matrix interferences in complex real-world scenarios. Importantly, this work confronts the often-overlooked bottlenecks of scalability in nanomaterial synthesis, inter-device variability and long-term biomolecule stability to outline the specific engineering milestones required for mass production. Consequently, this report serves as a foundational resource for researchers in food safety, as well as those in allied diagnostic fields.