Green Synthesis of NanoMaterials for BioSensing

From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain back on the eighteenth century, and mainly from the enormous technological development in several fields (electronics, computing, and robotics) occurred on the second half of the twentieth century that affected deeply industrial processing and manufacturing, most part of society, and even scientific community in some occasions, have usually associated the concept of industry in general, but specifically of Chemical Industry, to several rather negative concerns, such as: exploitation of natural resources; contamination, in general; air, water, and/or soil pollution; emission of tons of wastes; and, more recently, the menace of global warming and emerging pollutants. The main reason relies on the involvement of one or more chemical processes, with the subsequent spending of natural feedstocks and energy and the generation of by-products, in the manufacturing of most products that make our life easier. In fact, it is not possible to imagine how our life would be like without the enormous amount of goods generated by Chemical Industry. Nevertheless, from the establishment of the term “Green Chemistry” two decades ago, both academia and chemical industry are devoting their efforts to remove those old prejudices and to redirect the modern chemical industry to a greener, more efficient, and more sustainable development and production. One of the keystones of the Green Industry is the use of efficient synthetic routes (green synthesis) for producing compounds or (nano)materials in general that may be used directly or as part of more complex manufactures or devices, such as sensors and biosensors, widely used for analytical purposes. In this sense, this chapter intends to provide an overview of the most important green synthesis, mainly based on the clean ultrasound and microwave technologies or biosynthesis routes, and how they can be used to produce nanomaterials or materials for building (bio)sensing devices, whose production, in some cases, can be scaled up or industrially done, and even employed in the industry itself for detection and/or determination purposes and/or for quality control, among other applications. Finally, a critical discussion about the abovementioned topics and their relationships with sustainable development of chemical industry is reported.