Preparation of arctiin moleculary imprinted polymers with 4-vinylpyridine and Allyl-β-cyclodextrin as binary monomers under molecular crowding conditions

Abstract

This paper reported a feasible method to prepare molecularly imprinted polymer (MIPs) using 4-vinylpyridine (4-VP) and Allyl-β-cyclodextrin (β-CD) as binary functional monomer in the presence of polystyrene (PS). This is the first time that a surrounding of macromolecular crowding was established to improve the imprinting effect of cyclodextrins as monomer in organic solvents. The morphological and characteristics of the polymers with macromolecular crowding reagents were investigated by scanning electron microscope (SEM), fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and nitrogen adsorption experiments. The MIPs were synthesized with 4-VP and β-CD as binary functional monomers, a series of experiments were conducted to compare with the control groups. Furthermore, the selectivity of MIP for analogues experiment showed that the β-CD/4-VP MIP has higher specific recognition for arctiin than β-CD/4-VP NIP. A purification method by β-CD/4-VP MIPs coupled with macromolecular crowding reagents was developed for extraction arctiin from Arctium lappa L. In the MIP-SPE process, the optimal washing and eluting reagents are methanol/water (5:5) and methanol/acid (9:1), respectively. When using the β-CD/4-VP MIPs as SPE absorbent, the mean recoveries for arctiin were 87% with purity of 95%. All the results indicate that this synthetic method using 4-VP and β-CD as binary functional monomers in the presence of PS is a promising method for the preparation of selective adsorbents for arctiin analysis in Arctium lappa L.