Analytical chemistry with silica sol-gels: traditional routes to new materials for chemical analysis

The versatility of sol-gel chemistry enables us to generate a wide range of silica and organosilica materials with controlled structure, composition, morphology and porosity. These materials' hosting and recognition properties, as well as their wide-open structures containing many easily accessible active sites, make them particularly attractive for analytical purposes. In this review, we summarize the importance of silica sol-gels in analytical chemistry by providing examples from the separation sciences, optical and electrochemical sensors, molecular imprinting, and biosensors. Recent work suggests that manipulating the structure and composition of these materials at different scales (from molecular to macromolecular states and/or from micro- to meso- and/or macroporous levels) promises to generate chemical and biochemical sensing devices with improved selectivity and sensitivity.