Aarhus University Centre for Water Technology, Department of Biology, Section for Microbiology, Aarhus University, Ny Munkegade 114, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
Department of Chemistry and Coastal People: Southern Skies Centre of Research Excellence, University of Otago, Dunedin 9016, New Zealand.
ACS Sens. 2023 Jul 28;8(7):2432-2439. doi: 10.1021/acssensors.3c00961. Epub 2023 Jul 6.
Although there is a growing demand for new sensors for environmental monitoring, biofouling continues to plague current sensors and sensing networks. As soon as a sensor is placed in water, the formation of a biofilm begins. Once a biofilm is established, reliable measurements are often no longer possible. Although current biofouling mitigation strategies can slow the biofouling process, a biofilm will eventually develop on or near the sensing surface. While antibiofouling strategies are being continuously developed, the complexity of the biofilm community structure and the surrounding environment means that there is unlikely to be a single solution that will minimize biofilms on all environmental sensors. Thus, antibiofouling research often focuses on optimizing a specific biofilm mitigation approach for a given sensor, application, and environmental condition. While this is practical from the standpoint of a sensor developer, it makes the comparison of different mitigation strategies difficult. In this Perspective, we discuss the application of different biofouling mitigation strategies to sensing and then explore the need for the sensor community to adopt standard protocols to increase the comparability of the biofouling mitigation approaches and help sensor developers identify the most appropriate strategy for their system.
尽管人们对用于环境监测的新型传感器的需求不断增长，但生物污垢仍然困扰着当前的传感器和传感网络。传感器一放入水中，生物膜的形成就开始了。一旦生物膜形成，可靠的测量通常就不可能了。虽然目前的生物污垢缓解策略可以减缓生物污垢的形成过程，但生物膜最终仍会在传感表面或其附近形成。虽然正在不断开发抗菌生物污垢策略，但生物膜群落结构和周围环境的复杂性意味着不太可能有一种单一的解决方案可以最大限度地减少所有环境传感器上的生物膜。因此，抗菌生物污垢研究通常侧重于针对特定传感器、应用和环境条件优化特定的生物膜缓解方法。虽然从传感器开发人员的角度来看这是可行的，但这使得不同缓解策略的比较变得困难。在本观点中，我们讨论了不同生物污垢缓解策略在传感中的应用，然后探讨了传感器界采用标准协议的必要性，以提高生物污垢缓解方法的可比性，并帮助传感器开发人员为其系统确定最合适的策略。
