Smart materials for mercury and arsenic determination in food and beverages

In recent decades, the remarkable thermal, electronic, optical and mechanical properties of smart materials have attracted the attention of analytical chemists intending to address problems found in metal determination in food (use of time-consuming procedures and expensive techniques to reach the low limits of detection required for quality control, in particular for speciation). Moreover, some of these materials are interesting from the point of view of green chemistry, reducing waste by minimizing the consumption of reagents, solvents, extractants, and samples. In this review, we discuss the applications of some of the different smart materials found in the literature for mercury and arsenic determination in food and beverage samples: ionic imprinted polymers (IIPs), immunosorbent materials, metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), ionic liquids, aptamers, graphene-based materials, carbon nanotubes, surfactant-based materials, gold nanomaterials and silica-based nanomaterials. At the end of this study, we will examine the future challenges and present drawbacks of the existing smart materials.