Heavy Metals: Real Time, Field Deployable Lab on a Chip Sensing in Drinking and Environmental Waters

Lead exposure alone is linked to more than 1.5 million deaths each year, and toxic metals remain among the most consequential contaminants in drinking and environmental waters worldwide. New regulations, including the U.S. EPA’s 2024 Lead and Copper Rule Improvements and the revised EU Drinking Water Directive (2020/2184), are tightening monitoring expectations while laboratory ICP-MS detection remains too costly and infrastructure dependent to scale.Monitoring is entering a decentralized era. The field is moving from laboratory pipelines, where samples are shipped and analyzed days after contamination, to on chip platforms that sample, recognize and report on lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium and chromium directly at the point of water. The defining feature of these next generation platforms is the chip itself: a self-contained device that combines recognition, transduction and connectivity without ever returning to a central laboratory.Most current portable solutions operate at the cartridge or test strip scale, with separate steps for sample preparation, recognition and readout. Lab on a Chip platform uniquely combine preconcentration, multi metal recognition, signal transduction and connectivity on a single substrate, defining the next generation of water quality monitoring.The goal of this Research Topic is to bring together advances in real time, field deployable lab on a chip sensing of toxic metals in drinking and environmental waters, enabling continuous monitoring, citizen accessible testing and adaptive response at the scale and frequency that public health and environmental decisions actually require.We welcome contributions on themes including but not limited to:• Electrochemical, photoelectrochemical and optical sensing platforms for heavy metal detection• Nanostructured functional materials including metal oxides, chalcogenides, metal organic frameworks, MXenes and hybrid nanocomposites• Aptamer, molecularly imprinted polymer and nanozyme based recognition chemistries• Microbial fuel cell and bioelectrochemical sensors for heavy metal detection in wastewater and sediment matrices• On chip sample preparation, preconcentration and matrix interference removal in complex water matrices• Smartphone, wearable and Internet of Things integrated sensing platforms• Sensor networks for distributed, citizen led and community-based water monitoring• Field validation in real drinking, surface, ground, waste and industrial water matrices Topic editors: Abdelghani GHANAM, Dileepkumar V G, Daisy Das Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82090/heavy-metals-real-time-field-deployable-lab-on-a-chip-sensing-in-drinking-and-environmental-waters