Liquid crystal-based biosensors as lab-on-chip tools: Promising for future on-site detection test kits

Advancement in liquid crystal (LC) technology has achieved an impressive development of the sensing platforms. The long-range orientational order of LC molecules provides the valuable achievements of high response rate, simple operation, and proper stability of the LC sensing platforms. Accompanying LCs with biotechnology leads to the manifestation of the bioprobes with the substantial utilization in disease diagnostics, food safety, and environmental monitoring. The high sensitivity and excellent selectivity of the LC-based biosensors convert them to promising lab-on-chip kits for label-free, cost-effective, and real-time detection of a wide variety of targets. To facilitate the use of LC biosensors by non-specialist consumers for on-site monitoring of targets, portable smartphone devices are efficient as the complementary instrument for the LC-based biosensors. In this review, we summarize the recent achievements in the field of LC biosensor design for the qualitative monitoring and quantitative determination of the diverse targets. Finally, some results are represented to achieve a promising viewpoint for designing the novel LC-based test kits in the future.