Sample treatment procedures for environmental sensing and biosensing

•Environmental sensing benefits from techniques that isolate target analytes and improve the sensitivity.•SPE is an extraction and preconcentration technique that can be automated with relative ease.•The relevance of stand-alone devices for environmental monitoring can increase with implementation of automated sample preatreatment systems.

During the last years, a lot of efforts have been put into developing novel sensors and biosensors systems for monitoring the occurrence of emerging pollutants in the environment. These analyses are often challenging because of the variety of physico-chemical properties of these substances, the extremely diluted concentrations at which they can be found, and the intrinsic complexity of environmental matrices. In order to improve the (bio)sensors' performance, preconcentration/pretreatment techniques may be implemented. The automatization of these systems results in an autonomous, straight-forward alternative to classic chromatography-based methods, which in addition can operate remotely with real-time or pseud-real-time measurements. The present review offers an overview about these potentially automatable extraction techniques and provides some references about their recent use in environmental sensing and biosensors.

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