Emerging biosensor platforms for the assessment of water-borne pathogens

Abstract

Pathogens are key contaminants in water that are responsible for the generation of various water-borne diseases, and include viruses, fungi, bacteria, and protozoan parasites. The pathogenic effects of these species in water depend on their shape, size, composition, and structure. The resulting water-borne diseases are a serious threat to the environment, including to humans and animals, and are directly responsible for environmental deterioration and pollution. The potential presence of these pathogens requires sensitive, powerful, efficient, and ideally real-time monitoring methods for their reproducible quantification. Conventional methods for pathogen detection mainly rely on time-consuming enrichment steps followed by biochemical identification strategies, which require assay times ranging from 24 h to up to a week. However, in recent years, significant efforts have been made towards the development of biosensing technologies enabling rapid and close-to-real-time detection of water-borne pathogens. This review summarizes recent developments in biosensors and sensing systems based on a variety of transducer technologies for water-quality monitoring, with specific focus on rapid pathogen detection.

Monitoring Approaches for Faecal Indicator Bacteria in Water: Visioning a Remote Real-Time Sensor for E. coli and Enterococci

“…Biosensors detect microorganisms through a physiochemical transducer that is typically integrated into an electrical interface, which converts substance concentrations into electrical signals. Biosensors that require sample preprocessing, concentration, or enrichment procedures are common, and results are typically comparable to conventional FIB detection methods and high-accuracy tools [3,29,59,85,86].…”

“…Biosensors for E. coli or enterococci detection are grouped according to the type of substrate or physiochemical signal [3,87]; Table A1 provides more information about the categories of biosensors. In general, biosensors offer accurate and rapid results, but many remain sensitive to coinhabiting microorganisms and interferences, and some modern biosensors are better evaluated with specific environmental samples, to reduce problems related to selectivity and sensitivity [87].…”

“…The faecal indicator bacteria (FIB) Escherichia coli (E. coli) and enterococci can cause gastrointestinal, respiratory, and/or skin infections [1][2][3]. E. coli and enterococci are the most typically monitored FIB and reducing the time to a result of monitoring operations is important for proactive management of waters [4].…”

Nanomaterial enabled sensors for environmental contaminants

“…For the sake of brevity, herein we confine our discussion to the detection of Vibrio cholerae and the toxin it produces, cholera toxin, Legionella pneumophila , which was responsible for greater than 50% of the waterborne disease outbreaks between 2011 and 2012 [ 122 ], and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which the WHO recently classified as a critical pathogen in light of the proliferation of antimicrobial resistant species [ 123 ]. For expanded reviews we refer the reader to the works of Kumar et al [ 124 ] and Mocan et al [ 125 ].…”

Emerging Biosensing Technologies for Neuroinflammatory and Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnostics

“…Biosensors are commonly classified in electrochemical, optical, piezoelectric, or magnetic, based on the signal transduction mechanism. These technologies have broad applications in health (Zhang et al, 2017 ; El Harrad et al, 2018 ), food (Law et al, 2014 ; Vasilescu and Marty, 2016 ), and environmental sciences (Rapini and Marrazza, 2017 ; Kumar et al, 2018 ). Over the past years, the critical role of inflammation in disease has led researchers to develop biosensors for the specific detection of inflammatory mediators in clinically relevant body fluids.…”