Recent advances in hybrid nano-interfaces for environmental pollutant detection: design principles, signal...

There has been a significant increase in the demand for rapid, sensitive, and selective analytical methods to monitor pollution caused by heavy metals, pesticides, industrial chemicals, and emerging contaminants. Traditional analytical techniques such as chromatography and mass spectrometry are accurate but can be quite expensive, require complicated instruments, and involve a lot of sample preparation. Nanoengineered sensing platforms have emerged as a new option to address some of these issues, particularly those based on hybrid nanomaterials that incorporate multiple functions within a single structure. For example, hybrid nanomaterials that are made from combinations of metals, metal oxides, carbon nanomaterials, MOFs, quantum dots, or conducting polymers have synergistic physicochemical properties that include large surface area, improved electron transfer, tunable catalytic activity, and increased adsorption capacity. The combination of these properties results in improved signal transduction and analytical performance for environmental sensors. This article reviews the most recent progress in the development of hybrid nanomaterial-based interfaces for detecting environmental pollutants, discusses the design process and physicochemical properties associated with hybrid sensing platforms, and analyses the various signal transduction mechanisms used for environmental sensing through electrochemical, optical, photo electrochemical, and surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy techniques. The application of hybrid nano-interfaces has been highlighted through recent advancements in real-world monitoring of water and soil quality. Materials stability, reproducibility, selectivity, and large-scale manufacturing challenges to hybrid nano-interface technology have also been addressed as well as providing future perspectives for developing portable, smart, environmentally friendly sensing technologies. Hybrid nano-interface technology will be key to future environmental sensing systems with better analytical sensitivity and real-world applications.