Selective Enrichment of Clenbuterol onto Molecularly Imprinted Polymer Microspheres with Tailor-made Structure and Oxygen Functionalities

Abstract

The noxious clenbuterol misapplied as the feed additive has posed an enormous threat to humans who actively rely on the food chains with high potential of contamination by clenbuterol, such as pork and beef. It is, therefore, highly desirable to develop novel materials and strategies for dealing with the clenbuterol. Herein, functional polymer microspheres prepared by Pickering emulsion polymerization were explored for the selective enrichment of the clenbuterol, and their structure and oxygen functionalities could be tailor-made by a molecular imprinting process. The clenbuterol imprinting was adequately demonstrated to not only increase the particle size (~52 nm vs. ~42 nm) and create cavities for the accommodation of the clenbuterol molecules, but also reduce the oxygen functionalities of the resulting molecularly imprinted polymer microspheres (MIPMs) by approximately 4 at.%, which is believed to correlate with the high specificity of the MIPMs. Various characterization methods were employed to evidence these findings, including scanning electron microscopy, BET measurements, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and elemental mapping examination. More importantly, the MIPMs showed a markedly superior enrichment capability towards clenbuterol to the counterpart, that is, non-molecularly imprinted polymer microspheres (NIPMs). Compared to the NIPMs without specificity for clenbuterol, the MIPMs exhibited an impressive selectivity to clenbuterol, with the relative selectivity coefficient (k′) values largely exceeding 1, thus corroborating that the useful molecular imprinting led to the generation of the binding sites complementary to the clenbuterol molecule in the size and functionalities. The MIPMs were also employed as the stationary phase to fabricate molecularly imprinting solid-phase extraction column, and the spike recovery was demonstrated to be not significantly decreased even after nine cycles. Furthermore, the reliability of the method was also evidenced through the comparison of the MIPMs prepared from different batches.

Adsorption and Recognition Property of Tyrosine Molecularly Imprinted Polymer Prepared via Electron Beam Irradiation

“…For the MIP-Tyr, 3431 cm −1 was assigned to the vibration of -OH, and 1728 cm −1 was assigned to the C=O originating from the functional monomer MAA and cross-linker EGDMA. An obvious C=O vibration peak for L-Tyr was also observed at 1623 cm −1 , demonstrating the successful fabrication of the L-Tyr-loaded MIP [19,27]. For the spectra of MIP, the C=O vibration of L-Tyr disappeared, revealing the successful removal of the template molecule.…”

Biodegradable Polylactide/TiO2 Composite Fiber Scaffolds with Superhydrophobic and Superadhesive Porous Surfaces for Water Immobilization, Antibacterial Performance, and Deodorization

“…Conversely, the average number of the viable bacteria cells on the standard control test specimen in the absence of the ES PLA/TiO 2 fibers was dramatically increased after the 24 h of visible light irradiation, likely because bacterial proliferation readily proceeded without the inhibition effect from the destructive reactive oxygen species generated by the photocatalytic reactions over the PLA/TiO 2 fibers. As a result, the as-prepared PLA/TiO 2 fibers can find promising antimicrobial applications by considering its high antibacterial efficiency, as well as its robust and portable merits that cannot be obtained in the traditional powdery samples [34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46]. R 1 = (( N 0 – N 24h )/ N 0 ) × 100…”

Computational design of synthetic receptors for drug detection: interaction between molecularly imprinted polymers and MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine)

“…In relation to the selectivity, it is possible to infer that the MIP constructed under the conditions explained above possesses a relative selectivity in relation to the molecules amphetamine (AP), mescaline (MC), methamphetamine (MA), 2-(1H-Indol-3-yl)-N,N-dimethylethan-1-amine In comparison with other recognition tests, MIPs have many attractive features, such as easy preparation, high physical stability, excellent robustness as well as low cost. Due to all of these advantages, this material has gained a lot of attention in several fields, mainly in chromatographic separation [16,[62][63][64], solid phase extraction (SPE) [65,66] and sensing technologies [67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74]. In order to optimize the imprinting conditions, various approaches have been studied and, from this study, the computational approach indicates to be an efficient optimization strategy.…”