Nitrite in Nature: Determination with Polymeric Materials

Nitrogen compounds being important for the vital activities of living things are produced by the nitrification process and occurred spontaneously in the nitrogen cycle. Human vital activities are also responsible for the extra nitrogen released into the atmosphere. So, both human and environmental healths are negatively affected by the increasing nitrate and nitrate amounts in water and soil. For this reason, it is aimed to ensure regular control of nitrates and nitrites at certain levels in order to protect the universe and all living things. Their precise and selective determination by various methods is very important. Their determinations can usually be made by using electrochemical, spectrophotometric, chromatographic and titrimetric methods. Nowadays instead of these techniques, sensors are preferred in determining nitrate and nitrite due to their easy, fast, selective and sensitive application properties. Furthermore, polymeric materials have shown great promise for different sensing applications such as gas, humidity, explosive and water pollutants. Sensors, which are developed by polymerization, have very high quality for the determination of nitrite. The highly sensitive results of optical and electrochemical sensors attract the attention of researchers. In this review, different detection methods for nitrite ions and various studies on the preparation of polymeric sensors that can selectively capture the nitrite ions in complex matrices are examined.