Recent Progress in Optical Biosensors for Environmental Applications

The rapid screening and sensitive monitoring of environmental pollutants, such as pesticides, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), explosives, and toxins, is indeed essential to ensure environmental quality, and therefore, human health. Until recently, the quantification of most contaminants has been limited to the traditional chromato‐ graphic and spectroscopic technologies. These methods, although accurate with low detection limits, are labor-intensive and require expensive and sophisticated instrumentation, as well as complicated and multistep sample preparation, which prohibits frequent and real-time onsite monitoring of contaminants in environment.[1] Considerable research interests, therefore, have risen for detecting low levels of environmental pollutants in biosensor development be‐ cause of their simplicity, robustness, sensitivity, specificity and cost-effectiveness. [2]