Development of molecular imprinted polymers with high specificity and selectivity towards selected chiral acids

Abstract

Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) of three selected chiral acids like D-mandelic acid, L-phenyl lactic acid and D-phenyl glycine were prepared by bulk polymerization. To compare and analyse the binding efficiency of the imprinted polymers, non-imprinted polymers (NIPs) were also prepared. Various spectroscopic methods such as FT-IR and 1H NMR were employed for analyzing pre-polymerization solutions and for polymer characterization. Scanning electron microscopy gave the surface morphological differences between imprinted and non-imprinted polymers. Emphasis was given on the designing of imprinted polymers with maximum specificity and selectivity by altering the nature and degree of crosslinking in the imprinted system as well as by optimizing the various parameters related to the rebinding of the template molecule. The binding studies were carried out by batch equilibration method. Scatchard analysis was carried out to evaluate the binding parameters of the imprinted polymers. The selectivity of the developed polymers towards the imprinted template molecule were evaluated. The results indicated that the imprinted polymers exhibited excellent selectivity towards the imprinted molecules than other structurally related compounds. The ability of the enantiomer imprinted polymer for the enantioselective rebinding was investigated and found good. The attempts made in this work led to the successful design of molecular imprinted polymers with remarkable selectivity towards selected templates newline