Emerging Carbon Nanomaterials for Electrochemical Sensing of Biomedical and Toxic Chemicals

The rapid and reliable detection of toxic chemicals is essential for environmental protection, healthcare, and industrial safety.Conventional carbon-based electrodes such as graphite and glassy carbon have been widely applied, but their limited sensitivity and selectivity have driven interest toward nanoscale carbon.Carbon nanomaterials-including nanotubes, graphene derivatives, fullerenes, and nanodiamonds-offer unique advantages such as high surface-to-volume ratio, tunable electronic structure, and strong adsorption capacity, which can be tailored through doping, functionalization, or hybridization with metals and polymers.Recent studies demonstrate that carbon nanotubes provide highly responsive platforms for gas and heavy-metal sensing, while graphene-based electrodes enable fast and selective electrochemical detection of Heavy Metals, nitrates, glucose and trace contaminants.Fullerenes contribute distinct optoelectronic behavior, allowing non-enzymatic biosensing and photocatalytic degradation of pollutants, whereas nanodiamonds combine chemical robustness with wide electrochemical windows suitable for biomedical diagnostics.Collectively, these advances illustrate how structural diversity within the carbon family can be leveraged to design sensitive, selective, and low-cost sensors.Remaining challenges include achieving reproducibility across devices, maintaining stability under real-world conditions, and translating laboratory demonstrations into scalable systems.Future progress is expected from hybrid architecture, flexible substrates, and integration with data-driven platforms, positioning carbon nanomaterials as central to next-generation sensing technologies.