Nanocellulose in Sensing and Biosensing

TLDR

Nanocellulose is a multifunctional, renewable, biodegradable nanomaterial with exceptional mechanical, thermal, optical, and physicochemical properties that make it attractive for diverse applications. This review examines how nanocellulose is engineered and employed in biosensing technologies to provide analytical information for clinical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, food safety, mechanical sensing, labeling, and bioimaging. The authors discuss strategies for functionalizing nanocellulose and integrating it into optical and electrical sensing platforms. Nanocellulose-based platforms emerge as efficient, simple, cost‑effective, disposable optical and electrical sensors for healthcare, diagnostics, environmental monitoring, food quality control, forensic analysis, and physical sensing.

Abstract

Because of its multifunctional character, nanocellulose (NC) is one of the most interesting nature-based nanomaterials and is attracting attention in a myriad of fields such as biomaterials, engineering, biomedicine, opto/electronic devices, nanocomposites, textiles, cosmetics and food products. Moreover, NC offers a plethora of outstanding properties, including inherent renewability, biodegradability, commercial availability, flexibility, printability, low density, high porosity, optical transparency as well as extraordinary mechanical, thermal and physicochemical properties. Consequently, NC holds unprecedented capabilities that are appealing to the scientific, technologic and industrial community. In this review, we highlight how NC is being tailored and applied in (bio)sensing technology, whose results aim at displaying analytical information related to various fields such as clinical/medical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, food safety, physical/mechanical sensing, labeling and bioimaging applications. In fact, NC-based platforms could be considered an emerging technology to fabricate efficient, simple, cost-effective and disposable optical/electrical analytical devices for several (bio)sensing applications including health care, diagnostics, environmental monitoring, food quality control, forensic analysis and physical sensing. We foresee that many of the (bio)sensors that are currently based on plastic, glass or conventional paper platforms will be soon transferred to NC and this generation of (bio)sensing platforms could revolutionize the conventional sensing technology.