Rationally designing active molecularly imprinted polymer toward a highly specific catalyst by using metal as an assembled pivot

This article presents an original work on rationally designing molecularly imprinted polymer toward a highly specific catalyst. Creating a metallic pivot for molecular self-assembly, the imprinted material was prepared by coordinating polymerizable monomer 1-vinylimidazole around template p-nitrophenyl phosphate. The result indicates that the use of pivot plays a positive role on increasing the specificity of prepared material, so as to significantly promote the hydrolysis of p-nitrophenyl acetate and to decrease catalysis toward its analogue. Related information indicates that these could be a result of increasing the match between binding sites and the template, which makes the polymer capable of specifically recognizing the imprint species and of promoting the conversion of reactant.