With the expansion and advancement in agricultural and chemical industries, various toxic heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, mercury, zinc, copper, arsenic etc. are continuously released into the environment. Intake of sources contaminated with such toxic metals leads to various health issues. Keeping the serious effects of these toxic metal ions in view, various organic-inorganic nanomaterials based sensors have been exploited for their detection via optical, electrochemical and colorimetric approaches. Since a chemical sensor works on the principle of interaction between the sensing layer and the analytes, a sensor material with large surface area is required to enable the largest possible interaction with the target molecules and hence the sensitivity of the chemical sensor. However, commonly employed materials such as metal oxides and conducting polymers tend to feature relatively low surface areas, and hence resulting in low sensitivity of the sensor. Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) nanostructures are another category of organic-inorganic materials endowed with large surface area, ultra-high and tunable porosity, post-synthesis modification features, readily available active sites, catalytic activity, and chemical/thermal stability. These properties provide high sensitivity to the MOF based sensors due to the adsorption of large number of target analytes. The current review article focuses on MOFs based optical and electrochemical sensors for the detection of heavy metals.
Keywords: Electrochemical; MOF nanostructures; heavy metals; optical; sensors.