Recent advances in design, and applications of electrochemical sensors focused on green screen-printed electrodes to monitor heavy metals in food and beverage

Abstract

Heavy metals (HMs) are known as toxic and non-biodegradable pollutants. It is essential to develop a quick, and cost-effective sensing platform for the detection of HMs. Electrochemical sensor based on screen-printed electrodes (SPEs) have obtained continuous consideration in recent years by offering sensitivity, selectivity, disposability, cost-effectiveness, portability, simplicity in pretreatment steps, eco-friendly methods, and improving signal-to-noise ratio due to using a small sample volume. Various researches are being conducted to develop green sensing platforms to minimize toxic effects of reagents, materials, and solvents utilized in the structure of electroanalytical sensors to monitor HMs. Therefore, this review represents the efforts on the scope of detection of HMs based on green SPEs as eco-friendly environmental sensing systems. Moreover, it examines green electrochemical sensor design, and sensor performance in important features to present insights about practical challenges and successful approaches regarding to determination of HMs in the real samples of food and beverages. Lastly, future trends focusing on green portable electrochemical sensor development combined with artificial intelligence (AI) are highlighted. It was found that applying green modifiers for preparation of sensors based-SPEs such as non-hazardous materials, reagents, substrates as well as green synthesis methodologies can decrease or prevent environmental impact for detection of HMs. Additionally, an efficient pretreatment process can improve sensitivity and selectivity of assessment of HMs through eliminating interfering compounds. Notably, the combination of portable devices, AI and deep learning algorithms can enable to produce devices with capability of multi-analytes detection and delivering accurate and reliable results toward safety assurance and commercialization as future developments.