Department of Engineering, University of Messina, C.Da Di Dio, I-98166 Messina, Italy.
Center of Excellence in Electrochemistry, School of Chemistry, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran 16846-13114, Iran.
Biosensors (Basel). 2021 Dec 7;11(12):502. doi: 10.3390/bios11120502.
The rapid growth of research in electrochemistry in the last decade has resulted in a significant advancement in exploiting electrochemical strategies for assessing biological substances. Among these, amino acids are of utmost interest due to their key role in human health. Indeed, an unbalanced amino acid level is the origin of several metabolic and genetic diseases, which has led to a great need for effective and reliable evaluation methods. This review is an effort to summarize and present both challenges and achievements in electrochemical amino acid sensing from the last decade (from 2010 onwards) to show where limitations and advantages stem from. In this review, we place special emphasis on five well-known electroactive amino acids, namely cysteine, tyrosine, tryptophan, methionine and histidine. The recent research and achievements in this area and significant performance metrics of the proposed electrochemical sensors, including the limit of detection, sensitivity, stability, linear dynamic range(s) and applicability in real sample analysis, are summarized and presented in separate sections. More than 400 recent scientific studies were included in this review to portray a rich set of ideas and exemplify the capabilities of the electrochemical strategies to detect these essential biomolecules at trace and even ultra-trace levels. Finally, we discuss, in the last section, the remaining issues and the opportunities to push the boundaries of our knowledge in amino acid electrochemistry even further.
过去十年中电化学研究的快速发展使得利用电化学策略来评估生物物质取得了重大进展。在这些研究中，氨基酸因其在人类健康中的关键作用而备受关注。事实上，氨基酸水平的不平衡是多种代谢和遗传疾病的根源，这导致了对有效和可靠评估方法的迫切需求。
本综述旨在总结和展示过去十年（2010 年以后）电化学氨基酸传感方面的挑战和成就，以展示其局限性和优势所在。在本综述中，我们特别强调了五种著名的电活性氨基酸，即半胱氨酸、酪氨酸、色氨酸、蛋氨酸和组氨酸。分别对该领域的最新研究成果和所提出的电化学传感器的重要性能指标（包括检测限、灵敏度、稳定性、线性动态范围和在实际样品分析中的适用性）进行了总结和阐述。
本综述共纳入了 400 多项最新科学研究，以展示丰富的研究思路并举例说明电化学策略在痕量甚至超痕量水平下检测这些必需生物分子的能力。最后，在最后一节中，我们讨论了氨基酸电化学领域进一步拓展知识边界所面临的问题和机遇。
