Electrochemistry and Electroanalytical chemistry play an important role to face the challenges of the contemporary world. They have contributed to the advance of the scientific development of our country, helped to promote economic and social progress as well as cultural dissemination. These areas have greatly contributed to the knowledge about thermodynamics and kinetics of the electron transfer reactions, energy conversion, synthesis and modification of compounds, corrosion, and development of fast, sensitive, and selective analytical methods. This work presents an overview of the areas by analyzing the technical and scientific papers produced in Brazil on these subjects, and the analysis of the Brazilian scientific societies that were formed and consolidated, which have contributed to spread the scientific knowledge. The improvement of these areas can be attributed to the good quality of the human resources formed during long time as well as the growing of distribution of research groups in different regions of the country. The success/future of these areas are associated with good academic/scientific education, low cost of instrumentation, formation of networks of excellence between researchers, and large cooperation projects that improved with the sharing of ideas, technologies, infrastructure, and equipment. All of which has contributed to strengthening consolidated and emerging graduation programs.

Chemical imprinting technology has been widely used as a valuable tool in selective recognition of a given target analyte (molecule or metal ion), yielding a notable advance in the development of new analytical protocols. Since their discovery, molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) have been extensively studied with excellent reviews published. However, studies involving ion imprinted polymers (IIPs), in which metal ions are recognized in the presence of closely related inorganic ions, remain scarce. Thus, this review involved a survey of different synthetic approaches for preparing ion imprinted adsorbents and their application for the development of solid phase extraction methods, metal ion sensors (electrodes and optodes) and selective membranes.

MIPs are synthetic polymers that are used as biomimetic materials simulating the mechanism verified in natural entities such as antibodies and enzymes. Although MIPs have been successfully used as an outstanding tool for enhancing the selectivity or different analytical approaches, such as separation science and electrochemical and optical sensors, several parameters must be optimized during their synthesis. Therefore, the state-of-the-art of MIP production as well as the different polymerization methods are discussed. The potential selectivity of MIPs in the extraction and separation techniques focusing mainly on environmental, clinical and pharmaceutical samples as applications for analytical purposes is presented.

The aim of this paper is the description of the strategies and advances in the use of MIP in the development of chemical sensors. MIP has been considered an emerging technology, which allows the synthesis of materials that can mimic some highly specific natural receptors such as antibodies and enzymes. In recent years a great number of publications have demonstrated a growth in their use as sensing phases in the construction of sensors . Thus, the MIP technology became very attractive as a promising analytical tool for the development of sensors.

The aim of this work is to describe the recent area that it has been developed for the construction of amperometric sensors, with the purpose to make possible a more effective electron transfer between enzyme and electrode. The advances reported in the literature will be described, such as enzymatic configurations that can be mimic using the chemistry of the artificial enzymes.