A Facile and Universal Method to Prepare Hydrophilic Molecularly Imprinted Microspheres by Encapsulating a Polymer in Hollow Mesoporous Silica Microspheres

Hydrophilic molecularly imprinted microspheres (MIP@SiO2) for the adsorption of water-soluble molecules in real aqueous samples were successfully synthesized. In this strategy, a molecular imprinted polymer (MIP) was encapsulated in the hollow core of hollow mesoporous silica (HMS) particles via a ship-in-a-bottle' process. As the HMS shell contains plenty of Si-OH groups, the as-prepared microspheres proved to be hydrophilic and could be well dispersed in water. On the other hand, the MIP encapsulated in the HMS could specifically recognize small molecules with good binding efficiency through the mesoporous silica shell. Binding experiments in real aqueous solutions showed that the MIP@SiO2 composites have excellent recognition ability for specific molecules. Thus, MIP@SiO2 are highly promising alternatives to biological receptors with great potential for many analytical applications, such as environmental, food, and clinical analyses and other areas.