The Future of Water Quality: Biosensors for Real-Time Pollutant Detection

Ensuring the quality of drinking water is essential for safeguarding public health. However, the detection and monitoring of pollutants in water remain a significant challenge. Traditional methods like high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) are widely used for the detection, identification, and quantification of pollutants in water (Loos, 2012). Despite their accuracy, these techniques are costly, time-consuming, and require complex sample preparation. This underscores the need for innovative, efficient solutions like biosensors.

The Promise of Biosensors

Biosensors are analytical devices that combine biological recognition elements with transducers to generate a signal in response to specific interactions. They offer significant advantages over traditional methods such as minimal sample preparation, short measurement time together with high specificity, sensitivity, and low detection limits (Katey et al., 2023). In this sense, optical, label-free biosensors have demonstrated immense potential for detecting small organic pollutants in fresh water (Herrera-Domínguez et al., 2023). However, their application has been largely limited to single analytes in controlled laboratory environments, with minimal validation for real-world scenarios such as drinking water treatment plants.

While biosensors are widely used in medical fields, life sciences, and food safety, their adoption in drinking water monitoring lags behind. Most existing biosensors target wastewater pollutants, leaving a critical gap in monitoring drinking water quality before it reaches consumers. Moreover, the complexity of detecting ultra-low concentrations of diverse pollutants adds to the challenge.

NIAGARA’s Approach

The NIAGARA project aims to transform drinking water monitoring through innovative biosensor technology. The Nanobiosensors and Bioanalytical Applications (NanoB2A) research group at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience, one of the partners involved in NIAGARA, is developing multi-analyte biosensors capable of detecting four water pollutants with vastly different chemical natures: industrial compounds like Bisphenol A (BPA) and the pesticide imazalil, pharmaceuticals like ibuprofen and paracetamol, and microbiological pathogens like Helicobacter pylori. These optical biosensors detect changes in light properties to detect water pollutants with exceptional precision and speed. These devices rely on nanophotonic transducers—silicon-based chips with immobilized biological molecules, such as antibodies or other bioreceptors, on their surfaces (Chocarro-Ruiz et al., 2027). When a sample passes over the chip, the specific interaction between the target pollutant and the bioreceptor triggers a detectable change, such as a shift in refractive index. This highly sensitive method enables the direct detection of ultra-low concentrations of contaminants, generating the response in just few minutes. Moreover, the advanced design of these nanophotonic chips allows for the simultaneous detection of multiple analytes by incorporating various sensors in a single chip, making them a powerful tool for real-time water quality monitoring in complex environments.

Pioneering a New Era of Water Quality Monitoring

Despite significant advancements in identifying and mitigating sources of drinking water pollution, gaps remain in monitoring and predicting contamination pathways. NIAGARA’s technologies address these challenges, offering a reliable, cost-effective, and scalable solution for real-time water quality monitoring. By bridging the gap between laboratory research and real-world application, NIAGARA is set to revolutionize how we protect and manage our most precious resource—clean drinking water.

References

Katey, B., Voiculescu, I., Penkova, A. N., & Untaroiu, A. (2023). A review of biosensors and their applications. ASME Open Journal of Engineering, 2, 020201. Link

Loos, R. (2012). Analytical methods relevant to the European Commission’s 2012 proposal on priority substances under the Water Framework Directive (EUR 25532 EN). Publications Office of the European Union. Link

Herrera-Domínguez, M., Morales-Luna, G., Mahlknecht, J., Cheng, Q., Aguilar-Hernández, I., & Ornelas-Soto, N. (2023). Optical biosensors and their applications for the detection of water pollutants. Biosensors (Basel), 13(3), 370. Link

Chocarro-Ruiz, B., Fernández-Gavela, A., Herranz, S., & Lechuga, L. M. (2017). Nanophotonic label-free biosensors for environmental monitoring. Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 45, 175–183. Link