Editors' Choice—Review—The Future of Carbon-Based Neurochemical Sensing: A Critical Perspective

Abstract

Carbon-based sensors have remained critical materials for electrochemical detection of neurochemicals rooted in their inherent biocompatibility and broad potential window. Real-time monitoring, using fast-scan cyclic voltammetry, has resulted in the rise of minimally invasive carbon -fiber microelectrodes as the material of choice for making measurements in tissue, but challenges with carbon fiber’s innate properties have limited its applicability to understudied neurochemicals. Here, we provide a critical review of the state of carbon-based real-time neurochemical detection and offer insight into ways we envision addressing these limitations in the future. We focus on three main hinderances of traditional carbon-fiber based materials: diminished temporal resolution due to geometric properties and adsorption/desorption properties of the material, poor selectivity/specificity to most neurochemicals, and the inability to tune amorphous carbon surfaces for specific interfacial interactions. Routes to addressing these challenges could lie in methods like computational modeling of single-molecule interfacial interactions, expansion to tunable carbon-based materials, and novel approaches to synthesizing these materials. We hope this critical piece does justice to describing the novel carbon-based materials that have preceded this work, and we hope this review provides useful solutions to innovate carbon-based material development in the future for individualized neurochemical structures.