Nanobiohybrids: a promising approach for sensing diverse environmental water pollutants

Abstract

Abstract Water resource management has become the need of the hour with continuous depletion of good quality water. Sensors are important tools for monitoring the environmental water quality and quantifying the presence of various harmful pollutants (pesticides, heavy metals, and micro-organisms). Biosensors designed with functional biological molecules as recognition elements use a transducer, which converts a biological response into electrochemical, optical, gravimetric, magnetic, or thermal signals that can be easily quantified. The advent of nanotechnology has revolutionized material design and properties of sensing platforms. Materials in the nanoscale dimension possess interesting characteristic features such as high surface-area-to-volume ratio, high conductivity, functionalizability, shock-bearing ability, color tunability, photo-reactivity, and magnetization. Nanomaterial-integrated biomolecules with enhanced functional properties are termed as nanobiohybrids. The amalgamation of the tuneable characteristics of nanomaterials with functional biological molecules by means of functionalization and/or immobilization creates sophisticated transducers for enhancing the analytical performance of sensors. The resultant nanobiohybrid sensor systems are robust, exhibit relatively short response time with improved specificity and have higher sensitivity enabling detection of even trace volumes of analyte molecules. Recent advancements in research and engineering also promote the possibilities of device miniaturization, portability, and incessant monitoring of water quality. This chapter intends to discuss the impact of various toxic pollutants in water, the importance of nanomaterials in design of novel nanobiohybrids, the different nanomaterials relevant for use in design of sensors for environmental analysis, and finally the different transduction mechanisms that enable the detection and quantification of toxins in water.