# Functionalized Carbon-Based Electrochemical Sensors for Food and Alcoholic Beverages Safety
###### Abstract  
Food is a necessity in people's lives. Equally importantly, alcoholic beverages are also highly demanded globally due to the indispensable role they play in cultural, social, and ritual events. However, the production of food and alcoholic beverages suffers from a variety of contaminants, such as toxins, pesticides, antibiotic residues, and heavy metals, which are seriously harmful to human beings. These urgent threats have raised the awareness of the need to improve product quality and safety via developing effective, rapid, and economical monitoring and detecting methods. Fortunately, due to their numerous advantages, including high sensitivity, short response time, low cost, and easy portability, electrochemistry sensors have made huge contributions to ensuring the quality of food and alcoholic beverages. The purpose of this review is to introduce applications of electrochemical sensors to foods and alcoholic beverages, and to highlight the important role of carbon-based materials (i.e., carbon dots, carbon nanotubes, and graphene) as electrochemical sensors in detecting various contaminants. In addition, the preparation methods of these carbon-based electrochemical sensors and corresponding detection mechanisms are discussed in detail. It is hoped that this review can inspire more innovative detection technologies for ensuring the safety of food and alcoholic beverages. carbon-based materials; electrochemical sensor; food safety; alcoholic beverage safety; chemical contaminants +
Footnote †: journal: Medical  
contaminants and hazardous substances existing in foods and alcoholic beverages. The classical analytical methods can be mainly categorized as chromatography and spectroscopy disciplines. For instance, the commonly used chromatographic techniques include hydrodynamic chromatography (HDC), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), size exclusion chromatography (SEC), gas chromatography (GC), HPLC-mass spectrometry-mass spectrometry (HPLC-MSMS), matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI-TOF), and gas chromatographic-MSMS (GC-MSMS) [7; 8; 9; 10]. Although these chromatographic methods have advantages in terms of high separation efficiency, accurate quantitation ability, and excellent detection sensitivity, the extremely high cost of equipment and maintenance, and the complicated operation process involved, have seriously limited their ability to be applied to food and alcoholic beverages in a portable and fast way. Compared with chromatographic techniques, spectroscopic methods such as near-infrared (NIR), ultraviolet-visible (UV-vis), Raman, and fluorescence spectroscopies are more efficiently and conveniently operated and analyzed, even without the destruction of analytes. However, the disadvantages are also evident, such as the requirement of multistage pretreatment and the lack of wide applicability. Because of these shortcomings, novel advanced analysis methods are expected to realize the rapid and efficient analysis of contaminants and residues [11; 12]. Benefiting from numerous advantages, such as rapid response, high selectivity, flexibility, and portability, electrochemical sensors have become powerful candidates via transducing the specific interaction between analytes and sensors into recognizable electrical signals. Moreover, electrochemical sensors are cheap, simple, and applicable for various types of analytes. Generally speaking, electrochemical sensors are composed of sensitive components, conversion components, electronic circuits, and structural accessories [13]. As one of the important components, the active electrode, which is typically composed of nanomaterials with multiple properties, determines the sensitivity and functionality of electrochemical sensors [14; 15; 16].