A simple and efficient alginate hydrogel combined with surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy for quantitative analysis of sodium nitrite in meat products.

Sodium nitrite is a commonly used preservative and color protectant in the food industry. Conventional analytical methods are highly susceptible to food matrix interference, time-consuming and costly. In this study, the ion cross-linking method was employed to prepare alginate hydrogel substrates, and phenosafranin was chosen as a single-molecule probe to analyze sodium nitrite. Our investigation centered on elucidating the effects of alginate and cross-linking ion concentrations on Raman signal characteristics. The optimal Raman response was observed in the precursor solution with 1% sodium alginate and 0.1 mol L cross-linking ions. The relative standard deviations (RSDs) of the feature peaks from the three substrate batches ranged from 1.22% to 16.30%, attesting the robustness and consistency of the substrates. The signal reduction of the substrates after a four-week storage period remained below 10%, indicating that the substrates had good reproducibility and stability. The limits of detection (LODs) for sodium nitrite in extracts from cured meat, luncheon meat, and sliced ham were determined to range from 3.75 mg kg to 8.11 mg kg, with low interference from the food matrix. The support vector machine algorithm was utilized to train and predict the data, which proved to be more accurate (98.6%-99.8% recovery) than the traditional linear regression model (81.9%-112.7% recovery) in predicting the spiked samples. The application of hydrogel-based surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) substrates for nitrite detection in food, combined with machine learning for regression prediction in data processing, collectively augmented the potential of SERS technology in the field of food analysis.