Nowadays, at a time of growing concern for sustainable development and compliance with environmental standards and legislation, the detection of heavy metal contaminants in environmental matrices represents a difficul...Nowadays, at a time of growing concern for sustainable development and compliance with environmental standards and legislation, the detection of heavy metal contaminants in environmental matrices represents a difficult but important task. The current major limitation lies in the poor detection limits of the targeted pollutant＇s trace concentrations by the available conventional techniques. In order to elaborate a novel ＂living＂ self assembled electrochemical 3-D biosensor, the authors propose a new concept to overcome this shortcoming. The advantages of the properties of polyelectrolyte-functionalized NBs （nanobeads） are combined along with the use of non covalently strongly bound micro-organisms. The designed 3-D biosensor is all the more promising as it has showed a significantly improved sensitivity. In fact, the detection limits of the tested heavy metals （cadmium and mercury） were as low as 1.0 × 10^-12 mol.L-1 and six to seven orders of magnitude lower than those provided by conventional 2-D biosensors. Furthermore, it is potentially applicable to a wide range of bioreceptor-pollutant detection systems.展开更多
文摘Nowadays, at a time of growing concern for sustainable development and compliance with environmental standards and legislation, the detection of heavy metal contaminants in environmental matrices represents a difficult but important task. The current major limitation lies in the poor detection limits of the targeted pollutant＇s trace concentrations by the available conventional techniques. In order to elaborate a novel ＂living＂ self assembled electrochemical 3-D biosensor, the authors propose a new concept to overcome this shortcoming. The advantages of the properties of polyelectrolyte-functionalized NBs （nanobeads） are combined along with the use of non covalently strongly bound micro-organisms. The designed 3-D biosensor is all the more promising as it has showed a significantly improved sensitivity. In fact, the detection limits of the tested heavy metals （cadmium and mercury） were as low as 1.0 × 10^-12 mol.L-1 and six to seven orders of magnitude lower than those provided by conventional 2-D biosensors. Furthermore, it is potentially applicable to a wide range of bioreceptor-pollutant detection systems.
