Pesticides, due to their intensive use and their peculiar chemical features, can persist in the environment and enter the trophic chain, thus representing an environmental risk for the ecosystems and human health. Although there are several robust and reliable standard analytical techniques for their monitoring, the high frequency of contamination caused by pesticides requires methods for massive monitoring campaigns that are capable of rapidly detecting these compounds in many samples of different origin. Immunosensors represent a potential tool for simple, rapid, and sensitive monitoring of pesticides. Antibodies coupled to electrochemical or optical transducers have resulted in effective detection devices. In this review, the new trends in immunosensor development and the application of immunosensors for the detection of pesticides of environmental concern—such as glyphosate, organophosphates, and neonicotinoids—are described.

The indiscriminate use and mismanagement of antibiotics over the last eight decades have led to one of the main challenges humanity will have to face in the next twenty years in terms of public health and economy, i.e., antimicrobial resistance. One of the key approaches to tackling antimicrobial resistance is clinical, livestock, and environmental surveillance applying methods capable of effectively identifying antimicrobial non-susceptibility as well as genes that promote resistance. Current clinical laboratory practices involve conventional culture-based antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) methods, taking over 24 h to find out which medication should be prescribed to treat the infection. Although there are techniques that provide rapid resistance detection, it is necessary to have new tools that are easy to operate, are robust, sensitive, specific, and inexpensive. Chemical sensors and biosensors are devices that could have the necessary characteristics for the rapid diagnosis of resistant microorganisms and could provide crucial information on the choice of antibiotic (or other antimicrobial medicines) to be administered. This review provides an overview on novel biosensing strategies for the phenotypic and genotypic determination of antimicrobial resistance and a perspective on the use of these tools in modern health-care and environmental surveillance.

Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum herbicide widely used worldwide. Indeed, it is the herbicide most applied to all Mexican crops. Due to the overuse and poor disposal of the waste, this herbicide can reach the aquatic environments such as groundwater and surface water. Thus, there is a clear need to implement monitoring and surveillance programs for evaluating and controlling the exposure to this herbicide in rural populations. The goal of this study was to quantify the presence of glyphosate in different water bodies (groundwater, surface and drinking water) as well as to identify the uses and managements of water resources by rural communities to evaluate the potential human exposure to glyphosate in the Tenampulco region of the Mexican state of Puebla. Measurements were performed by a rapid and cost-effective ELISA-based method in groundwater and surface water from various sampling sites of the Tenampulco region. Glyphosate was detected in all groundwater samples to be below the maximum limit for glyphosate in water in Mexico. Nevertheless, these results indicate an exposure of glyphosate in these agricultural communities and the need to establish a monitoring program.

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Forest soils respond dramatically to management changes compared to other soils influenced by different land-use forms. This work aimed to compare the soil conditions in four different zones in a temperate forest in a biosphere reserve in Mexico, using a minimum data set (MDS) based on volcanic soils properties to develop a soil quality index (SQI). For this purpose, two different MDSs were used, one obtained from an expert opinion and the other through a multivariate principal component analysis (PCA). The soil quality assessment was conducted in a biosphere reserve in Mexico, where volcanic soils predominate. Four different areas were studied. Overall, six different types of SQI were calculated for each area, for which linear and nonlinear functions were used and the additive and weighted method. The six SQI showed a significant difference between the four areas of study. The zone with the highest SQI values was the zone with a preserved pine forest, followed by the zone with a pine forest managed by the population, and the zones with a pine forest and grassland in recovery showed the lowest SQI. The linear score indices obtained by the PCA indicated the better ability to differentiate the calculated SQI values, which would provide information to contribute to the stakeholder management and decision making in the protection, conservation and management of the ecosystems present in the biosphere reserve.