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In the global market era, food product control is very challenging. It is impossible to track and control all production and delivery chains not only for regular customers but also for the State Sanitary Inspections. Certified laboratories currently use accurate food safety and quality inspection methods. However, these methods are very laborious and costly. The present review highlights the need to develop fast, robust, and cost-effective analytical assays to determine food contamination. Application of the molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) as selective recognition units for chemosensors' fabrication was herein explored. MIPs enable fast and inexpensive electrochemical and optical transduction, significantly improving detectability, sensitivity, and selectivity. MIPs compromise durability of synthetic materials with a high affinity to target analytes and selectivity of molecular recognition. Imprinted molecular cavities, present in MIPs structure, are complementary to the target analyte molecules in terms of size, shape, and location of recognizing sites. They perfectly mimic natural molecular recognition. The present review article critically covers MIPs' applications in selective assays for a wide range of food products. Moreover, numerous potential applications of MIPs in the food industry, including sample pretreatment before analysis, removal of contaminants, or extraction of high-value ingredients, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP)-based chemosensor for the selective determination of a chosen toxin, N-nitroso- l-proline (Pro-NO), was devised and fabricated. By means of DFT, the structure of the pre-polymerization (functional monomer)-template complex was modeled. This complex was then potentiodynamically electropolymerized in the presence of cross-linking monomer to form a MIP-Pro-NO thin film. Next, the Pro-NO template was extracted from MIP-Pro-NO with 0.1 m NaOH. Piezoelectric microgravimetry (PM) on an electrochemical quartz crystal microbalance and electrochemical (differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS)) techniques were used to transduce binding of Pro-NO to molecular cavities of the MIP-Pro-NO. With DPV and EIS chemosensing, the limits of detection (LODs) were about 80.9 and 36.9 nM Pro-NO, respectively; and the selectivity coefficients for urea, glucose, creatinine, and adrenalin interferences were 6.6, 13.2, 2.1, and 2.0, respectively, with DPV as well as 2.3, 2.0, 3.3, and 2.5, respectively, with EIS. With PM under flow injection analysis conditions, the LOD was 10 μ m Pro-NO. The MIP-Pro-NO chemosensor detectability and selectivity with respect to interferences were sufficiently high to determine Pro-NO in protein-providing food products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]