Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering sensing of food contaminants

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) effect, a plasmonic nanostructure based vibrational spectroscopic technique, is an emerging tool for the study, characterization, and sensing in food science. This chapter will present the status of the use of SERS in the sensing of contaminants such as pesticides, environmental contaminants, pathogens, toxins, and illegal additives. SERS technique will be shown to effectively detect a wide range of food contaminants in relatively low LoD values, usually below the maximum concentrations in international regulations for each contaminant or class of contaminants. It will be shown that the technique may study the proposed classes of substances in controlled environments, but there remains a huge amount of studies to apply widely de technique in real food samples.