Abstract
DEVELOPMENT OF GRAPHENE BASED NANOSTRUCTURES AND ITS APPLICATIONS IN FOOD QUALITY CONTROL AND HEALTH CARE
Abhijit Kar Gupta, Arjun Dutta*, Dr. Kakoli Dutta* and Dr. Subhasis Rana
ABSTRACT
Synthetic dyes are very often used as food colors to make the food stuff attractive. All the dyes however, are not good for health and therefore are not permitted to be used in food. There are total nine synthetic dyes approved by U.S Food and Drug Administration(FDA) which are commonly used in soft drinks, breakfast cereals, candies snacks, baked goods, frozen desserts etc. Recently certain dyes contain azo-groups are also found to be deleterious to the consumers causing cancers, hyperactivity and other disorders. So the determination of trace amount of these toxic food dyes in food stuff has become an analytical challenge. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms(sp2 hybridized), that are packed in a hexagonal honeycomb crystalline structure. It has extremely high electron mobility at room temperature high surface to volume ratio and high electrical conductivity. Synthesis of graphene can be done either by chemical vapour deposition technique or by chemical exfoliation of graphite into Graphene Oxide(GO).The reduced GO(RGO) sheets are usually considered as one kind of chemically derived graphite whose properties can be altered depending on the reduction process. There is different domain of application in this graphene based nanostructures of which food quality control and healthcare is an important sector. In the present work our aim is to synthesize and characterize several graphene oxide based nanostructures and to study their applicability in the detection of trace amount of some carcinogenic food dyes.
[Full Text Article] [Download Certificate]