Synthesis of molecularly imprinted polymers for the application of selective clean-up vinblastine from Catharanthus roseus extract

Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are synthetic tailor-made polymers with high selectivity towards a particular substance (template). An MIP using vinblastine (VLB) as the template molecule was synthesized and characterized. The presence of monomer-template complexes in a non-covalent way was confirmed by UV-vis spectrometry analysis. The polymerization was performed using methacrylic acid (MAA) as the functional monomer, ethylene glycol dimethacrylate (EGDMA) as the cross-linking agent, and toluene as the porogenic solvent by a thermo-polymerization method. The characterization of the obtained MIP was evaluated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) analysis. It was observed that the morphology of the MIP was more porous and rough, and the surface area had a significant increase compared with that of the non-imprinted polymer (NIP). This MIP was used as the sorbents of solid-phase extraction (SPE) to assess the selectivity of the MIP after optimization of the SPE protocol. VLB was specifically adsorbed on the MIP cartridge, while to vincristine (VCR), the chemical analog of VLB, almost no selective binding appeared. On the basis of the results, Catharanthus roseus extract was applied to the MIP cartridge for investigating its capability to extract VLB from the plant extract, and the capacity of the MIP cartridge was also evaluated. It was shown that the MIP could effectively enrich VLB from C. roseus extract and the recovery amounted to 93.8%. The solvents dissolving the samples had significant influence on the capacity of the MIP cartridge; it was 750 mu g/g in toluene, 625 mu g/g in chloroform, and 250 mu g/g in methanol.