Recent advances on the electrochemical transduction techniques for the biosensing of pharmaceuticals in aquatic environments

Abstract

Due to the potential risk to the environment and humans’ health, there has been an increasing concern on the development of new analytical methods for monitoring the presence of pharmaceuticals in various aquatic ecosystems, such as in freshwaters (rivers and lakes), sewage and sea water . The conventional techniques, such as liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry) are not only laborious but possess other important limitations, such as the high cost and/or the low sensitivity for this application, which needs to be rapidly overwhelmed. In light of this context, the electrochemical biosensors combine the attractive features of biological components (mainly the high selectivity of enzymes, antibodies and nucleic acids) used as units of recognition to the robustness of the electrochemical techniques, which provides stable output signals even at low concentrations of the target analytes. In this mini review, we reported the recent researches in the field of biosensors for the detection of important pharmaceuticals, whose transduction mechanisms are based on amperometric, potentiometric, conductometric and impedimetric methods.