Mammalian cell-based sensors for high throughput screening for detecting chemical residues, pathogens, and toxins in food

Abstract This chapter is an update of current biosensor technologies based on mammalian cells for food safety and quality control applications. Particular emphasis is given to commercially available methods and products (as well as their market evaluation so far). The majority of the commercially operational cell-based biosensors available for food safety utilize higher eukaryotic cells as opposed to prokaryotic cells. The considerable advantages, and also some weaknesses, of the mammalian cell approach are evaluated against other cell-based biosensor systems. Finally, this chapter illustrates the perspectives of using these novel detection platforms for investigating, for the first time in the history of analytic science, the synergistic effects between several pollutants and assessing biological risk at various levels and against multiorgan and multispecies elements.