A Hand-Held Based Sensor for Seafood Freshness Assessment

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: The seafood industry is well aware of the need for maintaining product quality. It has traditionally relied on subjective sensory analysis through human sniff tests for the assessment of seafood freshness. However, experts are costly and too few in number. Alternative objective tests are expensive, complicated, time consuming, require toxic chemicals and destructive sampling, and are difficult to perform outside the laboratory. Therefore, there is a great interest from the seafood industry for simple, fast, low-cost, portable, easy-to-use instruments that can rapidly assess seafood freshness. The novel sensor described here combines three unique approaches: an array-based chemical sensor, composed of incrementally different conducting polymers; a unique signal transduction system allowing the detection of very small signals; and an on-board microcomputer, custom-programmed into a Field Programmable Gate Array. The Phase I study demonstrated that the lab-scale sensor can (1) successfully identify chemicals related to seafood freshness/spoilage, and (2) provide direct assessment of seafood freshness when real seafood samples were evaluated. No chemicals are required, it is not a destructive test, and it is an easy approach consisting on sniffing the sample under study. During the Phase II project, a hand-held sensor for assessment of seafood freshness will be developed and tested.