ZnO nanostructures for biosensing applications: Recent advances, challenges, and future perspectives

Abstract

The development and use of materials with nanoscale spatial dimensioning is the focus of the field of nanotechnology, which has significantly influenced recent advancements in biosensing technologies. Detecting various toxins in the food, environmental monitoring, drug development, forensics, illness progression diagnosis at affordable prices is becoming essential in underdeveloped nations leading to creation of biosensors more popular. Biosensors are now all-pervasive and its creation can make use of a wide variety of methodologies. The connection of transducer with high-affinity reagents such as antibodies, enzymes and synthetic biomolecules offer specificity of the biosensors. Due to the biocompatibility, Zinc Oxide (ZnO) nanostructures have impressively shown their potential for biosensing applications. ZnO nanostructures are a good candidate to be used as active site in biosensors due to their detecting capabilities at the bio-analyte level. ZnO nanostructures strongly binds to the biomolecules because of their high iso-electric point, show strong sensitivity due to their high surface to volume ratio and are also used as matrix layer in biosensors. The progression in artificial intelligence, health technology, and industrial production, will be advanced by intensive study of ZnO biosensors. This review first highlights the recent developments in diverse ZnO nanostructure morphologies, and key synthetic methods utilised to produce ZnO nanostructures. Second, fabrication of the ZnO biosensors for each category of dimensions for detection of analytes which are important for human health and the environment, such as haemoglobin, glucose, viruses and cancer biomarkers. Finally, future research directions for ZnO-based biosensors are summarized, to revolutionize biosensing in even more intriguing ways.