Proteinaceous moieties are critical elements in most detection systems, including biosensing platforms. Their potential is undoubtedly vast, yet many issues regarding their full exploitation remain unsolved. On the other hand, the biosensor formats with the higher marketability probabilities are enzyme in nature and electrochemical in concept. To no surprise, alternative materials for hosting catalysis within an electrode casing have received much attention lately to demonstrate a catalysis-coated device. Graphene and ZnO are presented as ideal materials to modify electrodes and biosensor platforms, especially in protein-based detection. Our group developed electrochemical sensors based on these nanomaterials for the sensitive detection of cholesterol using cholesterol oxidase incorporated in stabilized lipid films. A comparison between the two platforms is provided and discussed. In a broader sense, the not-so-remote prospect of quickly assembling a protein-based flexible biosensing detector to fulfill site-specific requirements is appealing to both university researchers and industry developers.

This work presents a novel metal-supported bilayer lipid membrane (BLM) biosensor built on tyrosinase to quantitate phenol. The detection strategy is based on the enzyme–analyte initial association and not the commonly adopted monitoring of the redox cascade reactions; such an approach has not been proposed in the literature to date and offers many advantages for environmental monitoring with regard to sensitivity, selectivity, reliability and assay simplicity. The phenol sensor developed herein showed good analytical and operational characteristics: the detection limit (signal-to-noise ratio = 3) was 1.24 pg/mL and the sensitivity was 33.45 nA per pg/mL phenol concentration. The shelf life of the tyrosinase sensor was 12 h and the lifetime (in consecutive assays) was 8 h. The sensor was reversible with bathing at pH 8.5 and could be used for eight assay runs in consecutive assays. The validation in real water samples showed that the sensor could reliably detect 2.5 ppb phenol in tap and river water and 6.1 ppb phenol in lake water, without sample pretreatment. The prospects and applicability of the proposed biosensor and the underlying technology are also discussed.