Analytical tools monitoring endocrine disrupting chemicals

Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are harmful, xenobiotic compounds requiring a multi-tiered analytical approach for a reliable management. Although worth efforts worldwide, comprehensive EDCs monitoring and risk-assessment still require improvements. This article covers possible risks for public health due to EDCs exposure, and revises the maturity reached in different analytical detection fields, with a special focus on biosensor technology. Among validated laboratory-techniques, hyphenated mass-spectrometry-based chromatography provides high selectivity and multi-analyte detection, while in vitro bioassays enable reliable toxicological testing. However, none of these methods is suitable for fast in field, continuous or semi-continuous operations. Due to advances in material science and synthetic biology, now biosensor technology holds the promise to close this gap and, although not included yet in routinely screening programs, fulfill the necessary requirements to sustain a coherent and global strategy to assess the state of environmental pollution.