Chemical Imprinting Technology Applied to Analytical Chemistry: Current Status and Future Outlook in Brazil

Chemical imprinting technologies based on molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) and ion imprinted polymers (IIPs) have been widely applied in different fields of analytical chemistry since their discoveries in 19721 and 19762, respectively. MIPs and IIPs are considered biomimetic materials with tailor-made synthetic receptors and are, essentially, obtained by co-polymerization of functional and cross-linking monomers in the presence of a target analyte (a molecule for MIPs and an ion for IIPs). The great advantages of these materials over biological recognition systems include their relatively low cost, quick preparation, and, most importantly, their stability in different media. To date, these biomimetic materials have experienced a rapid development with wide applications in electrochemical sensors, luminescence sensors, separation science, sample preparation, and more specific sensor applications such as surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) sensors. In addition, they have been applied for analysis of samples of environmental, food, and forensic interests, as well as for disease diagnostics.3-8 Figure 1 depicts the increasing number of published papers per year over the past 20 years on the topic of MIPs and IIPs; as expected, most of these papers are devoted to the chemical imprinting of molecules.