Abstract: Foodborne hazards pose a potential threat to human health. Establishing accurate and sensitive detection methods is the core means to ensure food safety and prevent this risk. Fluorescence detection methods have been widely applied in the field of food safety testing, due to their advantages such as high sensitivity and simple operation. However, the complexity of food matrices imposes certain limitations on traditional fluorescence detection methods in terms of selectivity, anti-interference ability, and portability. Fluorescent molecularly imprinted paper-based sensors (FMIPS) provide unique advantages for constructing anti-interference rapid food safety detection platforms, owing to their unique structure, favorable designability, good selectivity, sensitivity, and portability. This article provides a systematic summary of the causes of interference with FMIPS in food matrices and their anti-interference mechanism, focusing on the anti-interference strategies, including precise identification, time gating and spectrum dimension identification, ratiometric strategy, carrier auto-fluorescence masking, signal conversion, and sample pretreatment. In addition, the applications of FMIPS in food safety detection are summarized and analyzed with the aim of providing theoretical support for the design and applications of fluorescent sensors.

Key words: fluorescent molecularly imprinted paper-based sensors; matrix interference; precise identification; time gating and spectral dimension recognition; ratiometric strategy; carrier auto-fluorescence masking; signal conversion; sample pretreatment