Facile polymerizable surfactant inspired synthesis of fluorescent molecularly imprinted composite sensor via aqueous CdTe quantum dots for highly selective detection of λ-cyhalothrin

In this paper, we develop a method by using octadecyl-4-vinylbenzyl-dimethyl-ammonium chloride (OVDAC) as a surfactant to transfer aqueous CdTe quantum dots (QDs) with excellent fluorescent property to organic solvent, after a surface imprinting-directing polymerization process, a high-performance aqueous QDs-polymer fluorescent imprinted composite sensor was obtained and used for highly selective recognition of lambda-cyhalothrin (LC). Here, OVDAC was first used in the fabrication of fluorescent imprinted composite sensors, and the OVDAC-modified CdTe QDs were used as the solid supports and auxiliary monomers. Through this novel strategy, strong fluorescence of aqueous QDs was inherited in the resultant MIPs. After the experimental conditions were optimized, a linear relationship was obtained covering the linear range of 0.1-16 mu mol L-1 with a correlation coefficient of 0.9989 and a high imprinting factor about 5.99. In addition, the MIPs-OVDAC/CdTe QDs had higher molecular selectivity and sensing specificity than two kinds of molecularly imprinted silica coated QDs which were prepared by the Stober method and reverse microemulsion method, respectively. The developed method was applicable to routine trace determination of LC in real examples. This study provides a general strategy to fabricate high-performance fluorescent sensors based on QDs which were originally water-soluble for highly selective detection of environmental pollutants. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.