Opto-Plasmonic Biosensors for Monitoring Wheat End-Products Quality

The aspect of food quality is of increasing interest for both consumers and food industry. Detection of chemical contaminants and specific quality-related components are required. In this sense, biosensors can play a prime role, because these devices allow cheap and continuous monitoring of contaminants along the pasta production chain and are also useful to identify allelic variants of genes coding for protein associated to bad or good quality of wheat end-products. In this work we report the production of a whole-cell biosensor based on bacterial cells genetically modified to respond to the presence of metal ions by fluorescence or luminescence emission, and of a biosensor based on Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance (LSPR), that is able to detect nucleic acid sequences characterizing different allelic variants.