Nanocellulose in Sensing and Biosensing

Because of its multifunctional character, nanocellulose (NC) is one of the most interesting nature-based nanomaterials and is attracting attention in a myriad of fields such as biomaterials, engineering, biomedicine, opto/electronic devices, nanocomposites, textiles, cosmetics and food products. Moreover, NC offers a plethora of outstanding properties, including inherent renewability, biodegradability, commercial availability, flexibility, printability, low density, high porosity, optical transparency as well as extraordinary mechanical, thermal and physicochemical properties. Consequently, NC holds unprecedented capabilities that are appealing to the scientific, technologic and industrial community. In this review, we highlight how NC is being tailored and applied in (bio)sensing technology, whose results aim at displaying analytical information related to various fields such as clinical/medical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, food safety, physical/mechanical sensing, labeling and bioimaging applications. In fact, NC-based platforms could be considered an emerging technology to fabricate efficient, simple, cost-effective and disposable optical/electrical analytical devices for several (bio)sensing applications including health care, diagnostics, environmental monitoring, food quality control, forensic analysis and physical sensing. We foresee that many of the (bio)sensors that are currently based on plastic, glass or conventional paper platforms will be soon transferred to NC and this generation of (bio)sensing platforms could revolutionize the conventional sensing technology.