Environmental toxicity monitoring using electrochemical biosensing systems

Environmental monitoring faces the challenge of measuring an increasing number of analytes at ever decreasing concentrations. Since not all species of a given analyte have the same detrimental impact on the environment, new analytical devices and techniques are required to distinguish between the different species of a pollutant or different groups of pollutants. This paper describes analytical techniques based on biomaterials that are toxically sensitive to pollutants. This approach permits the biomonitoring of certain compounds by looking at their toxic properties. Although these techniques are based on a sound analytical strategy, their applications are limited because most of the interactions between the biological material and the analyte are irreversible. Additionally, the immobilised biological material has a limited stability. Several biomonitoring strategies based on electrochemical biosensing are discussed here and how to recover the bioactivity of biosensing system, both in discrete and automated procedures, is also reviewed.