Abstract
Drug residues, organic dyes, heavy metals, and other chemical pollutants not only cause environmental pollution, but also have a serious impact on food safety. Timely and systematic summary of the latest scientific advances is of great importance for the development of new detection technologies. In particular, molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) can mimic antibodies, enzymes and other biological molecules to recognize, enrich, and separate contaminants, with specific recognition, selective adsorption, high affinity, and strong resistance characteristics. Therefore, MIPs have been widely used in chemical analysis, sensing, and material adsorption. In this review, we first describe the basic principles and production processes of molecularly imprinted polymers. Secondly, an overview of recent applications of molecularly imprinted polymers in sample pre-treatment, sensors, chromatographic separation, and mimetic enzymes is highlighted. Finally, a brief assessment of current technical issues and future trends in molecularly imprinted polymers is also presented.
Highlights
Food safety issues causing poisoning or death have become a major concern worldwide
molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are outstandingly resistant to high temperature and pressure, acid and alkali, recyclable, and easy to store, making them suitable as sensitive materials for sensors for the analytical detection of real samples
MIPs have been developed from single templates to composite templates, and the preparation process has been continuously optimized to improve the application range, adsorption performance and specific selectivity
Summary
Food safety issues causing poisoning or death have become a major concern worldwide. Chemical pollutants, such as agricultural pesticides (Xiao et al, 2019), veterinary drug (Zhou et al, 2018), persistent organic pollutants (Ren et al, 2018), dyes (Im et al, 2017), and heavy metals (Rudd et al, 2016), usually have the characteristics of micro-toxicity, carcinogenesis, refractory degradation, and bioaccumulation (Liu X. et al, 2018; Rutkowska et al, 2018; Tarannum et al, 2020). Imprinted polymers are molecules that selectively bind to templated molecules in manufacturing processes through a “lock-andkey” mechanism, involving analytical chemistry, biology, and polymeric materials (Wulff, 2002; Han et al, 2016) It attracted much attention in the 1977 after Wulff et al (1977) reported molecular imprinting technology, which uses a specific target molecule as a template to bind to the monomeric form of MIPs. After removal of the template molecule and crosslinking, MIPs have selective recognition sites that are completely complementary to the template molecule in terms of shape, size, and functional group (Huang et al, 2018). The synthesis of MIPs mainly involves three steps: (1) Template molecules and functional monomers combine via covalent or non-covalent interactions to form complexes (Figueiredo et al, 2016).
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