Sample treatment procedures for environmental sensing and biosensing

Abstract

During the last years, a lot of efforts have been put into developing novel sensors and biosensors systems for monitoring the occurrence of emerging pollutants in the environment. These analyses are often challenging because of the variety of physico-chemical properties of these substances, the extremely diluted concentrations at which they can be found, and the intrinsic complexity of environmental matrices. In order to improve the (bio)sensors' performance, preconcentration/pretreatment techniques may be implemented. The automatization of these systems results in an autonomous, straight-forward alternative to classic chromatography-based methods, which in addition can operate remotely with real-time or pseud-real-time measurements. The present review offers an overview about these potentially automatable extraction techniques and provides some references about their recent use in environmental sensing and biosensors.