An overview of enzyme-based biosensors for environmental monitoring

Designing of Nanomaterials-Based Enzymatic Biosensors: Synthesis, Properties, and Applications

“…In the last decades, the concerns involving environmental pollution have intensified due to the constant growth of contaminants and pollutants harmful to the environment [334]. There is a clear need for developing new methods for monitoring the levels of pollutants in the environment, such as heavy metals and pesticides [335,336]. Traditional analytical techniques, such as chromatographic methods, are challenging to incorporate because they require costly reagents, time-consuming sample pre-treatments, and expensive equipment, apart from not being efficient in in situ measurements, as in the case of accidental releases of pesticides or acute poisoning [21,337,338].…”

“…In this context, enzyme-based biosensors appear as a potential alternative, as they have several advantages over other traditional tools, by being economical, user-friendly, highly sensitive, accurate, and large-scale enabled [335,340,341]. Currently, the primary water and soil pollutants are heavy metals, such as aluminum (Al), cadmium (Cd), copper (Cu), lead (Pb), chromium (Cr), mercury (Hg), and zinc (Zn) [342,343]; and pesticides, such as atrazine, endosulfan sulfate, diethyl atrazine, chlorpyrifos, etc.…”

“…Several enzymes, such as urease [347][348][349], horseradish peroxidase [343,350,351], glucose oxidase [287,352], invertase [353,354], and dehydrogenase [355][356][357] can be highly efficient in metal identification analyses, based either on the activation or on the inhibition of the specific enzyme. Heavy metals generally act as cofactors of metalloproteins to form an essential part of the structure that is required for enzyme activation [335,342]. Enzyme inhibition, on the other hand, occurs in the parts of the enzyme where the interaction between heavy metals and thiol or methylthiol groups of amino acids takes place [337,358].…”

“…OPH has emerged as a promising alternative for detecting organophosphorus compounds, owing to its wide range of compatible substrates and its variety of possible bonds, such as P-F, P-O, P-S, and P-CN [375]. It is also highly specific for the detoxification of the PdF bond (G agents) of organophosphates such as sarin; however, OPH is ineffective for other classes of organophosphates such as PdO, PdS, and PdCN [335]. In another work, Du et al designed a nanomaterial-based biosensor by covalently coupling OPH loaded on quantum dots with carbon nanotubes or gold composites.…”

Highly Sensitive Micropatterned Interdigitated Electrodes for Enhancing the Concentration Effect Based on Dielectrophoresis

“…Molecular analysis provides meaningful information such as food quality or safety in food sciences, degree of water or air pollution in environmental sciences, and presence of disease or therapeutic effect in life sciences [1,2,3]. In particular, analyses of biomolecules have continuously been desired since biomolecules are not only essential to one or more biological processes but also their deficiency or excess can cause various diseases.…”