Environmental toxicity monitoring using electrochemical biosensing systems

Environmental monitoring faces the challenge of measuring an increasing num ber of analytes at ever decreasing concentrations. Since not all species of a given analyte have the same detrimental impact on the environment, new a nalytical devices and techniques are required to distinguish between the di fferent species of a pollutant or different groups of pollutants. This pape r 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 be cause most of the interactions between the biological material and the anal yte are irreversible. Additionally, the immobilised biological material has a limited stability. Several biomonitoring strategies based on electrochem ical biosensing are discussed here and how to recover the bioactivity of bi osensing system, both in discrete and automated procedures, is also reviewe d.