Abstract
The growing number of pollutants requires the development of innovative analytical devices that are precise, sensitive, specific, rapid, and easy-to-use to meet the increasing demand for legislative actions on environmental pollution control and early warning. Optical biosensors, as a powerful alternative to conventional analytical techniques, enable the highly sensitive, real-time, and high-frequency monitoring of pollutants without extensive sample preparation. This article reviews important advances in functional biorecognition materials (e.g., enzymes, aptamers, DNAzymes, antibodies and whole cells) that facilitate the increasing application of optical biosensors. This work further examines the significant improvements in optical biosensor instrumentation and their environmental applications. Innovative developments of optical biosensors for environmental pollution control and early warning are also discussed.
Highlights
Innovative analytical devices featuring precision, sensitivity, specificity, speed, and usability continue to be developed to meet the increasing demand for legislative actions on the monitoring of a growing number of pollutants
This review focuses on recent advancements in optical biosensors and provides examples of relevant, specific applications and their analytical performance in environmental pollution monitoring and early warning
Despite the fact that great progress has been made in improving the reliability of enzyme-based optical biosensors and extending their capabilities to higher sensitivity and selectivity and faster response time, a number of limitations still exist in environmental pollution control and early warning [11]
Summary
Innovative analytical devices featuring precision, sensitivity, specificity, speed, and usability continue to be developed to meet the increasing demand for legislative actions on the monitoring of a growing number of pollutants. These methods require sophisticated and expensive instrumentation, expert personnel for their operation, and multistep and complicated sample preparation These methods are labour intensive and time consuming, and it is difficult to achieve on-site, real-time, and high-frequency monitoring of contaminants [1]. To meet these requirements, researchers have been striving to develop robust, cost-effective, automated water-monitoring devices for the rapid and sensitive analysis of environmental pollutants. Optical biosensors that exploit light absorption, fluorescence, luminescence, reflectance, Raman scattering and refractive index are powerful alternatives to conventional analytical techniques (Figure 1) These biosensors provide rapid, highly sensitive, real-time, and high-frequency monitoring without any time-consuming sample concentration and/or prior sample pre-treatment steps. New developments in optical biosensors for pollution control and early warning will be reviewed
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