Abstract

Environmental monitoring is essential to protect the ecosystem and human health. Currently, there is a limited number of deployable sensors for emerging contaminants. Biology-enabled sensing methods are addressing this gap by using biological components as sensors. This review provides a perspective on recent advances in biology-enabled sensors, with a focus on cell-free sensors, whole-cell sensors, and multicellular sensors. These tools can be leveraged to produce sensitive, deployable, and at times rapid sensing technologies. Many sensor-related studies have focused on deployment in aqueous matrices that are optically transparent. This perspective paper extends beyond aqueous environments to examine emerging approaches for biology-enabled monitoring of analytes in soil and air. By comparing sensing mechanisms, sensitivity, limit-of-detection, and response time across different matrices, this review highlights tradeoffs in sensor performance. Finally, this review outlines future directions for improving biology-enabled sensors to make them more robust, scalable, and capable of real-time sensing for comprehensive environmental monitoring.