Surface Imprinted Micro- and Nanoparticles

Abstract

Abstract In surface imprinting, the binding sites are mainly formed at or close to the surface of a substrate, and thus, interactions between template molecules and molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) are not mass-transfer limited anymore (Erturk and Mattiasson, 2017 [1]). Since biologically relevant macromolecules such as proteins (Kempe et al., 1995; Pluhar et al., 2013 [2] , [3] ) or even entire biological entities such as bacteria or cells (Mora et al., 2003; Pick et al., 2009 [4] , [5] ) are restricted in their mobility, surface imprinting is a promising strategy for the synthesis of materials imprinted for large species enabling easy access to the recognition sites. Moreover, the amount of template used during polymerization is generally lower compared to other imprinting techniques, which is an important advantage if the target is available only in low quantities or is expensive (Erturk and Mattiasson, 2017 [1] ). A variety of approaches for surface imprinting have been reported including soft lithography (Yang et al., 2015 [6] ), dispersed-phase polymerization (Wang et al., 2017; Nabavi et al., 2017 [7] , [8] ), and grafting of a polymer layer, e.g., via core-shell imprinting (Zhang et al., 2009 [9] ) and are described below. Surface imprinted particles can be applied for enrichment (Chang et al., 2007 [10] ), clean-up [11] , or separation (Dinc et al., 2018 [12] ) and even for biomimetic assays.