The availability of safe food is crucial for maintaining both nutritional well-being and overall health security. Estimates indicate that 1 in 10 people fall ill after consuming contaminated food, and globally, 420,000 people die each year due to unsafe food consumption….Traditional methods of detecting foodborne pathogens and other contaminants are often time-consuming and demand technologies that are rapid, highly sensitive, and hold a point-of-use application. Biosensors that utilise CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology stand as a suitable alternative offering immense potential for research and development (R&D), and scalability, thus ensuring food safety.

Several kinds of CRISPR-based biosensor technology are currently under R&D for food safety applications. Notably, the detection of Listeria monocytogenes, the cause of listeriosis—a major foodborne illness—was facilitated through the development of a fluorescent-based CRISPR-Cas biosensor. A biosensor to detect E. coli O157:H7 in milk samples, which causes severe illness, was recently developed as well.

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