Artificial enzyme mimics cascade catalysis for signal amplification and transduction in food quality determination: An overview of fundamentals and recent advances

Nanozyme-based food quality detection plays an increasingly important role in ensuring food safety throughout the whole food industry chain. However, the insufficient catalytic activity and low signal transduction capability of nanozyme-based food analysis methods have severely limited their widespread application in the food industry. Encouragingly, the artificial enzyme mimics cascade catalysis inspired by life activities and has shown various advantages, such as good selectivity, high catalytic efficiency through improving substrate concentration in the local microenvironment, and signal amplification and transduction, which can perfectly compensate for the above weaknesses and is expected to improve the food applications of nanozyme-based detection. Besides, compared with the rational design of nanozyme and external reaction conditions, cascade reaction is a facile and universal method due to the fact that the process does not involve nanozyme synthesis and external factors change. However, the lack of a systematic understanding of enzyme mimics cascade catalysis-driven food quality detection limits their in-depth application. Herein, we have comprehensively discussed the signal amplification and transduction of the artificial enzyme mimics cascade catalysis, the types of output signals, the developed biosensors, their recent advances in food detection, and future prospects. It is expected that this review can improve the practicality of nanozyme-based food quality detection technologies in the food industry.