Recent Progress in Technologies for Rapid Detection of Foodborne Pathogens

Foodborne diseases are one of the main problems affecting food safety. The establishment of rapid detection methods for foodborne pathogens is essential to control the biological risks of agricultural products and foods during production, processing, transportation, storage, port customs clearance, sale and consumption. Traditional methods for detecting pathogenic microbes are time consuming and tedious and cannot detect pathogenic bacteria in foods in time. In recent years, with the rapid development of biotechnology and increasing requirements for food safety monitoring, the research and development of rapid detection methods for foodborne pathogens have gained great attention. Although there are currently various methods for detecting foodborne pathogens, unified evaluation criteria are lacking, making it difficult to compare the methods. This article reviews rapid detection technologies frequently reported in the literature and those commercially applied such as chromogenic medium, adenosine triphosphate luminescence, immunological technologies, molecular biological technologies, biosensors, flow cytometry and spectroscopy, and compares these detection methods from multiple perspectives such as food matrices, detection limits, detection time, advantages and disadvantages, as well as requirements for pre-enrichment/separation/enrichment pretreatment steps. Furthermore, the basic principles, main technical routes and key parameters of the various methods are summarized. We hope that this review can provide a reference for technical evaluation and comparison of related methods in the future.