Environmental pollution continues to create a need for analytical technologies that can provide reliable information on contaminants while reducing the environmental footprint of the monitoring process itself. Conventional analytical methods often depend on complex instrumentation, energy-intensive workflows or synthetic reagents that can generate additional chemical waste. This has increased interest in sensing approaches that combine analytical performance with greater sustainability.
Researchers from the University of Belgrade and INRAE have published a new review exploring the potential of natural pigments as functional components of biosensors for environmental monitoring. The review examines how naturally occurring compounds such as anthocyanins, betalains, curcumin and chlorophyll can be used to generate measurable responses to environmental changes, offering an alternative to conventional synthetic sensing materials. The versatility of these pigments is central to their sensing potential. Their optical and chemical properties can change in response to environmental conditions or interactions with target analytes, producing signals that can be detected through colourimetry, fluorescence or electrochemical measurements. The review brings together applications spanning heavy-metal detection, gaseous pollutants, pH monitoring and nucleic-acid detection, demonstrating how the same class of naturally derived materials can support sensing across very different environmental targets.
One particularly interesting direction is the development of portable and low-instrumentation sensing systems. Natural pigments have been incorporated into paper-based sensors, polymeric films, hydrogels and other solid-state platforms, with some systems enabling visual detection directly in environmental samples. Smartphone-assisted analysis and other digital approaches are further extending these concepts towards quantitative and potentially decentralised monitoring. There is also a potential of whole-cell biosensors, where environmental contaminants trigger biological pathways that result in pigment production or a measurable change in pigment-related signals. This approach adds a different dimension to conventional chemical sensing by using biological responses as the basis for detecting environmental conditions.
However, sustainability alone does not make a sensing material suitable for real-world deployment. Natural pigments can suffer from limited stability, sensitivity to light, temperature, oxygen and pH, as well as lower selectivity or signal intensity compared with some synthetic alternatives. Considerable research is therefore focused on stabilisation through encapsulation, polymeric matrices, nanomaterials and hybrid structures to preserve the advantages of natural pigments while improving their analytical performance and operational lifetime.
This research is particularly relevant to the broader development of sustainable biosensing approaches for environmental pollution. It demonstrates how sensing materials derived from biological sources can reduce reliance on synthetic and potentially environmentally burdensome components in analytical systems. By bringing together developments in natural pigments, materials science, electrochemical and optical sensing, and whole-cell biosensing, the publication highlights several directions through which environmental monitoring could become more portable, accessible and resource-efficient. Ultimately, the significance of these developments extends beyond replacing one sensing material with another. The combination of biodegradable sensing components, simple signal generation and portable analytical platforms could enable monitoring systems to be deployed closer to where pollution occurs, while reducing the resources required for analysis. This contributes to the growing scientific effort to make environmental sensing itself more sustainable; an important step towards more responsible and responsive pollution monitoring.
