Living-Moss Multimodal Biosensing for Urban Atmospheric Metal Burden: Laboratory Calibration and Field Evaluation.

Living moss-based biosensing platform accurately estimates urban atmospheric metal burden with R2 up to 0.91 in laboratory and 0.84 in field conditions.

• Why it matters: Monitoring atmospheric metals is limited by traditional sampling and analysis methods, creating a need for rapid, cost-effective screening tools to assess pollution levels and prioritize detailed chemical testing.
• What they did: Researchers developed MossSense-HM, a multimodal biosensor using Hypnum cupressiforme that combines electrical, optical, and microclimatic measurements, and applied machine learning to predict metal accumulation from exposure data.
• The result: The biosensor's Metal Pollution Index correlated strongly with chemical measurements, enabling effective site screening and environmental assessment, though transferability across different conditions requires further validation.