Advances and Challenges of Single-Atom Metals-Based Materials for Sensing Applications through Structure–Function Relationships

The development of single-atom metal-based materials (SAMMs) has attracted increasing attention from scientists because of their high atomic utilization efficiency and outstanding electronic structures. Leveraging the active sites, electronic configurations, and coordination environments of the isolated dispersed metals, the SAMMs are widely employed in catalytic reactions and sensing, which is referred to as structure–function relationships. In particular, the sensing capacity of SAMMs toward various analytes has been originally reported in a lot of literature. However, this topic has rarely been systematically reviewed, and the current challenges along with potential countermeasures to address them remain underexplored in existing review articles. Here, this review concentrates on the advanced design and research progress of SAMMs developed in recent years, in which those SAMMs can sensitively and selectively detect a series of analytes through the structure–function relationships and have been applied in multiple fields such as environmental assays, biomarker monitoring, clinical diagnosis, and disease treatment. Furthermore, this review provides an in-depth discussion of the current challenges faced by SAMMs in sensing applications, thereby facilitating the proposal of potential countermeasures. Considering the comprehensive understandings of the electronic interactions and coordination environments in SAMMs, this review helps to build the knowledge hierarchy in multiple disciplines and provides promising prospects regarding the integration and extension of material sciences, computational chemistry, environmental chemistry, biochemistry, and biomedical sciences.