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. This piece focuses 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.