Molecularly Imprinted Polymer as an Antibody Substitution in Pseudo-immunoassays for Chemical Contaminants in Food and Environmental Samples

Abstract

The chemical contaminants in food and the environment are quite harmful to food safety and human health. Rapid, accurate, and cheap detection can effectively control the potential risks derived from these chemical contaminants. Among all detection methods, the immunoassay based on the specific interaction of antibody-analyte is one of the most widely used techniques in the field. However, biological antibodies employed in the immunoassay usually cannot tolerate extreme conditions, resulting in an unstable state in both physical and chemical profiles. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are a class of polymers with specific molecular recognition abilities, which are highly robust, showing excellent operational stability under a wide variety of conditions. Recently, MIPs have been used in biomimetic immunoassays for chemical contaminants as an antibody substitute in food and the environment. Here, we reviewed these applications of MIPs incorporated in different analytical platforms, such as enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, fluorescent immunoassay, chemiluminescent immunoassay, electrochemical immunoassay, microfluidic paper-based immunoassay, and homogeneous immunoassay, and discussed current challenges and future trends in the use of MIPs in biomimetic immunoassays.

The Selectivity of Molecularly Imprinted Polymers

“…The binding assay relies on the nonlinearity of the theophylline binding isotherm of the MIP [ 21 ]. Many other MIP binding assays have been developed since the cited pioneering work [ 22 , 23 , 24 ].…”

Facile approach to the synthesis of molecularly imprinted ratiometric fluorescence nanosensor for the visual detection of folic acid

“…These binding sites are complementary to the targeted analytes in size, shape, and functional groups, so to possess specific recognition ability and improve the selectivity and the detection efficacy (Komasawa, Ueki, Kaminoh, & Nishi, 2010). Besides the high affinity to targets, other unique superiorities of MIPs, namely good chemical stability, physical robustness, easy preparation and low cost, have been spotlighted to be an ideal alternative to biological receptor (i.e., antibodies and enzymes) in many fields, including sample pretreatment (Chen, Xu, & Li, 2011), immunoassays (Chen et al, 2018), biomimetic catalysis (Menger et al, 2016) and so on. Especially, in biological/chemical sensing field (Yang et al, 2018), MIPs have been turned out to be a hotspot.…”

A microtitre chemiluminescence sensor for detection of pyrethroids based on dual‐dummy‐template molecularly imprinted polymer and computational simulation

“…What is more, this material can be synthesized within several days, and can be recycled dozens of times. Therefore, there have been many articles reporting the use of MIPs as recognition elements to develop various analytical methods for the detection of different analytes, such as electrochemical sensor, pseudoimmunoassay and flow‐injection CL method . Previously, there have been some papers reporting the synthesis of MIPs for PYs, but most of the reported MIPs are used as absorbents to develop different sample extraction methods, and only two of these have been used as recognition reagents to prepare CL methods for detection of PYs …”