Applications of Molecularly Imprinted Polymer Nanoparticles and Their Advances toward Industrial Use: A Review.
Artificial receptors exhibit several advantages compared to their biological counterparts such as stability, robustness and handling. Additionally, nanostructured materials exhibit excellent properties such as high surfaceto volume ratio, low cost and easy preparation and handling. Consequently, the approach of molecularly imprinting has been extended from bulk materials to nanomaterials. We are reviewing the numerous applications of molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) nanoparticles (NPs) and briefly discuss their synthesis. Furthermore, we discuss how and for which applications industry starts to use MIP NPs and what the current limitations are. MIP NPs can be applied as antibody replicae economizing template molecules and facilitating storage. Moreover, nanocomposite materials possess additional functionalities such as magnetic and semi conductive cores. Nanosized MIPs are widespread applied for analytical separation via solid phase extraction (SPE) but also improves sensitivity in capillary electrophoresis (CE) Furthermore, such nanomaterials are applied in the field of sensors, e.g. in combination with transducers such as surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) MIP grafted optosensing materials, namely quantum dot (QD) composites, even allow for fluorescence detection of non fluorescing analytes. Nevertheless, MIP NPs are also suitable for bio applications such as drug delivery and pseudoimmunoassay. Finally, we critically discuss limitations and applications specific problems.
Analytical chemistry