Nanosensors have attracted tremendous, scientific and application, interests promoted by the advances in nanotechnology and emerging new nanomaterials. There has been rapid progress in developing chemiresistive nanosensors, and these sensor technologies are being transferred among a variety of different fields, from energy, environment to life science. This review presents nanomaterials with special convex/concave structures used for chemiresistive sensors, which mainly composed of one-dimensional conductive structures, e.g. nanowires, nanotubes, nanopores and nanochannels. Furthermore, designing, operation, and applications of current chemiresistive nanosensors are discussed to give an outlook of this field, especially for ionic solution and gas as the working chemical environments. The authors hope this review could inspire the active interest in the scientific field of sensor development and application. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.