Review: Electrochemical biosensors based on ZnO nanostructures

In the last few decades’ electrochemical biosensors have witnessed vast developments due to the broad range of different applications, including health care and medical diagnosis, environmental monitoring and assessment, food industry, and drug delivery. Integration of nanostructured material with different disciplines and expertise of electrochemistry, solid-state physics, material science, and biology has offered the opportunity of a future generation of highly rapid, sensitive, stable, selective, and novel electrochemical biosensor devices. Among metal oxide nanomaterials, ZnO nanostructures are one of the most important nanomaterials in today’s nanotechnology research. Such nanostructures have been studied intensely not only for their extraordinary structural, optical, and electronic properties but also for their prominent performance in diverse novel applications such as photonics, optics, electronics, drug delivery, cancer treatment, bio-imaging, etc. However, functionality of these nanomaterials is eventually dictated by the capability to govern their properties including shape, size, position, and crystalline structure on the nanosized scale. This review aims to update the outstanding advancement in the developments of the enzymatic and non-enzymatic biosensors using a different structure of ZnO nanomaterials. After a coverage of the basic principles of electrochemical biosensors, we highlight the basic features of ZnO as a potential anticancer agent. focused attention gives to functionalized biosensors based on ZnO nanostructures for detecting biological analytes, such as glucose, cholesterol, L-lactic acid, uric acid, metal ions, and pH.