ABSTRACT Water pollution is becoming increasingly severe, posing a serious hazard to human health and ecological security. Therefore, it is necessary to develop rapid, sensitive, and universal analytical methods to detect residual pollutants in actual water. Electrochemiluminescence (ECL) is a highly promising analytical technology for monitoring pollutants due to its inherent advantages, such as zero background and ultrahigh sensitivity. Rare metals (rare earth metals, precious metals, and refractory rare metals) with unique electronic structures, significant catalytic activity, stable optical properties, and perfect conductivity can significantly enhance the performance of ECL sensors by regulating luminescence efficiency, signal amplification, and specific recognition. Regarding the different functional roles of rare metals in the construction of ECL sensors, their applications are divided into signal amplification materials, ECL nanoemitters, and resonance energy transfer receptors or donors. Focusing on key pollutants (high toxicity, strong bioaccumulation potential, and wide‐ranging impacts) in aqueous environments as analytes, this review classifies rare metal‐based ECL sensors and emphasizes their recent advances. It analyzes the intrinsic pathways through which rare metals enhance ECL efficiency when employed as electrode modification materials, with particular emphasis on the structure–activity relationships between rare metal‐based materials and ECL performance, clarifying the enormous potential of rare metal‐based ECL sensors in breaking through the limitations of existing detection methods. This review also discusses the design methodologies meeting the application requirements of ECL sensors, such as diverse signal amplification strategies and innovative sensing modes in rare metal‐integrated ECL sensors. Finally, it analyzes the current problems of rare metal‐based ECL sensors in water pollutant detection and proposes potential optimization pathways for the future.
Xing et al. (Fri,) studied this question.