Abstract
We report on the development of new optical sensors using molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) combined with different materials and explore the novel strategies followed in order to overcome some of the limitations found during the last decade in terms of performance. This review pretends to offer a general overview, mainly focused on the last 3 years, on how the new fabrication procedures enable the synthesis of hybrid materials enhancing not only the recognition ability of the polymer but the optical signal. Introduction describes MIPs as biomimetic recognition elements, their properties and applications, emphasizing on each step of the fabrication/recognition procedure. The state of the art is presented and the change in the publication trend between electrochemical and optical sensor devices is thoroughly discussed according to the new fabrication and micro/nano-structuring techniques paving the way for a new generation of MIP-based optical sensors. We want to offer the reader a different perspective based on the materials science in contrast to other overviews. Different substrates for anchoring MIPs are considered and distributed in different sections according to the dimensionality and the nature of the composite, highlighting the synergetic effect obtained as a result of merging both materials to achieve the final goal.
Highlights
We have presented a new review based on molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) composites for the development of optical sensors from the point of view of the materials, their nature and properties, different from others already published focusing on the analyte, the transduction mechanism or the fabrication methodology
Inside the sensor field, electrochemical transduction schemes have been dominating the trending until the last year, when optical sensors surpassed them
We attributed this effect to the new improvements over the main limitations that showed MIPs obtained following classical fabrication methodologies, where the format was finely controlled, that is, bulks or spheres but binding kinetics or, for optical sensors, their integration with the transducer element were not convenient
Summary
Imprinted Polymers (MIPs) are synthetic polymeric materials showing selective molecular recognition sites created during the polymerization as a result of the addition of molecular templates of interest [1]. Functional monomers (FMs) interact with the template molecule (T) in order to perform a well-stablished FM-T complex showing a defined stoichiometry (Figure 1, step 1) This step is crucial as different interactions between these two species will rule both the selectivity and the further recognition process in the final polymer [2,3]. Polymerization enables the creation of molecular pockets defined in terms of size, shape and functional groups distribution, that remain after the template extraction (Figure 1, step 4) as a consequence of the crosslinking degree of the polymeric matrix [13] This step will strongly depend on the nature of the FM-T complex requiring harsh conditions, even refluxing the material to break the covalent interactions or just milder acidic treatments to break non-covalent interactions [14].
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