Chemicals and pesticides contamination in the food, drinking water, and environment ecosystem have become one of the most serious problems for human public health in the world due to their large amount used and wide application in the agriculture industry. Therefore, the detection and analysis of contamination in the food and drinking water by using techniques that are simple and suitable for fast screening are important. This review gives an overview of the last trends and recent advances biosensors for chemicals and pesticides detection based on electrochemical, optical and mechanical transducers strategies. Furthermore, the biosensors are classified according to their immobilized biorecognition elements including aptamer, antibodies, enzymes, and molecularly imprinted polymers. The implementation of nanomaterials such as graphene, carbon nanotubes, and metals nanoparticles are also emphasized and discussed in this review, these nanomaterials provides remarkable features to the biosensors such highly sensitive and accurate which allowing efficient pesticides detection. In addition to highlighting and summarizing various novel sensors, this review also provided some drawbacks, challenging, prospects as well as the current efforts to enhanced optical sensors. © 2013 IEEE.