In recent years, more attention has been focused on the efficient detection of chemical pollutants, especially small volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and hazardous gases (HGs), using various electronic sensors. This area is constantly growing given the current challenges in highly toxic molecules detection considering global human and animal feeding issues. In particular, the detection of relatively volatile molecules at room temperature, is challenging at low concentration levels, and there is therefore a need to develop new sensitive and low-cost sensors.1 Compared to e-sensors, coordination complexes present several assess in the context of food chemistry. In particular, taking into account contamination of cereal products with acrylamide and asparagine which needs full attention of the chemist community. In this context, we draw our attention to a new series of iron precursors, i.e. mononuclear complexes,2 able to detect at real time, and with a high selectivity and ultra-sensitivity, 32 different VOCs and HGs.3 In particular amines, which are detected rather quickly (< 10 min) and with a very high sensitivity. The detection is accompanied by significant and fast colour changes detectable by the naked-eye at ambient conditions. But not only, since the detection can be achieved using simple and intuitive standard chemometric means with a handful smartphone-based analytical method. In addition to their high thermal stability (up to 175 °C), colorimetric sensors showed excellent reusability by consecutive cycles of adsorption–desorption. These sensors are low-cost, environmentally friendly, easy to use, and show excellent and fast detection performances. Such features were exploited in food freshness detection for three sorts of commercial meat products (beef, chicken and pork).3,4
Garcia et al. (Mon,) studied this question.