Food safety is a widespread global concern with the emergence of foodborne diseases. Thus, establishing accurate and sensitive detection methods of harmful contaminants in different food matrices is essential to address and prevent the associated health risks. Among various analytical tools, mass spectrometry (MS) can quantify multiple impurities simultaneously due to high resolution and accuracy and can achieve non-target profiling of unknown pollutants in food. Therefore, MS has been widely used for determination of hazardous contaminants [e.g., mycotoxin, pesticide and veterinary drug residues, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, acrylamide, perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) and p-Phenylenediamine compounds (PPDs) in food samples]. This work summarizes MS applications in detecting harmful contaminants in food matrices, discusses advantages of MS for food safety study, and provides a perspective on future directions of MS development in food research. With the persistent occurrence of novel contaminants, MS will play a more and more critical role in food analysis.

Bismuth vanadate (BiVO₄), a well-known semiconductor photocatalyst with various advantages, has shown great potential in addressing energy and environmental issues. However, its inherent drawbacks restrict the photocatalytic performance of pure BiVO₄. In the past few years, many efforts have been devoted to improving the catalytic activity of BiVO₄ and revealing the degradation mechanism in depth. In this review, we summarized the recent progress on BiVO₄ in the field of photocatalytic degradation, including the strategies which enhance light absorption ability and suppress the recombination of charge carriers of BiVO₄, as well as the related degradation mechanism. Finally, future prospects and challenges are summarized, which may provide new guidelines for designing more effective BiVO₄-based photocatalysts for the degradation of persistent organic pollutants.