SnO2 based composites for electrochemical sensing applications: A review

Abstract

Food safety is one of the major challenges around the globe due to the contamination of food from chemicals, biological and environmental pollutants, heavy metals, and organic pollutants. Most of the pollutants are non-degradable or their degradation process is difficult. The toxicity of the environmental pollutants affects the human health as well as aquatic life. This motivated the researchers towards the development of sensitive, cost-effective and selective sensing technologies for pollutants' detection and clinical diagnostic applications. In particular, electrochemical sensors offer significant advantages such as low detection limit, portability, simplicity, benign fabrication process, selectivity and recovery in real samples. Numerous electrode materials were explored for the construction of electrochemical sensors and nanostructured tin dioxide (SnO<inf>2</inf>) based materials exhibited excellent electrochemical performance for the detection of environmental pollutants and biomolecules. This review highlights the recent developments in the preparation of SnO<inf>2</inf> based electrode modifiers towards the fabrication of electrochemical sensors and their applications in the monitoring pollutants' detection. The limitations of the SnO<inf>2</inf> based materials and their future perspectives have been discussed. © 2025 Elsevier B.V.