It's a bug's life: biosensors for environmental monitoring.

As we strive to better understand and manage risks to human health and ecosystems, the demands on environmental monitoring are increasing. Stricter regulations and a greater public awareness of environmental issues bring requirements to monitor an ever-wider range of analytes in air, water and soil, and to do so with greater frequency and accuracy. Meanwhile, operators are looking to contain the costs of increasingly complex monitoring regimes. In response to these issues, environmental analysts have sought improvements in laboratorybased analytical methods as well as portable solutions that allow sampling and analysis to be undertaken reliably on-site. Analysts already have a range of portable analytical techniques at their disposal for continuous, in situ monitoring across a variety of environmental matrices and analytes. In the 1970s, portable gas chromatographs were developed that brought smaller, more rugged versions of laboratory models to newly-identified hazardous waste sites. These were followed in the 1980s by immunochemical techniques – inspired by clinical laboratories – that were capable of tackling an everincreasing list of environmental analytes. More recently, biosensors has emerged as another promising technology in the analyst’s armoury, especially for applications requiring continuous monitoring. But what are biosensors exactly and how will they contribute to environmental monitoring and analysis?