Paper Title
Environmental Pollution Monitoring with Biosensors

Abstract
Environmental pollution can be defined as addition of undesirable material into the environment as a result of development of industrial activities. Pollutants are classified according to their chemical structure and according to their mode of action, such as endocrine disruption, cytotoxicity, carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, or genotoxicity. Todays, environmental pollution is an important problem for most of the countries in the world. Biosensors can be used as environmental quality monitoringtools in the assessment of biological or ecological qualityelements or for the chemical monitoring of both inorganicand organic priority pollutants.According toIUPAC recommendations 1999, a biosensor is an independentlyintegrated receptor transducer device, which is capable of providingselective quantitative or semi-quantitative analytical informationusing a biological recognition element. A biosensor consists of three main elements, abioreceptor, a transducer and a signal processing system. Biosensors that detect a compound ora group of compounds based on the specific biorecognitionof a molecule. Biosensors areclassified into immunochemical, enzymatic, non-enzymaticreceptor, whole-cell and DNA biosensors according to the biorecognition principle. Surface, drinking and groundwater have been the targetsof the majority of biosensors applied in the environment. Soils and sediment samples should undergo an extractionstep to draw out contaminants into a liquid solution.To draw out contaminants into a liquid solution, soils and sediment samples need to an extractionstep.Air samples can be analysed directly with biosensors.A large number of biosensors have been developed inresearch laboratories. In environmental monitoring, biosensors were used for determination of pesticide residues, antibiotic residues, toxins, and measurement of biological oxigen demand (BOD) in air, water and soil samples. I would like to thank to the Scientific Research Unit of Karabuk University for supporting this study. Key Words - Biosensors, environment, pollution, monitoring.