Approaches to the Rational Design of Molecularly Imprinted Polymers Developed for the Selective Extraction or Detection of Antibiotics in Environmental and Food Samples

Abstract

The World Health Organisation (WHO) reported antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as a global threat comparable to terrorism and climate change. The use of antibiotics in veterinary or clinical practice exerts a selective pressure, which accelerates the emergence of antimicrobial resistance. Therefore, there is a clear need to detect antibiotic residues in complex matrices, such as water, food, and environmental samples, in a fast, selective, cost‐effective, and quantitative manner. Once problematic areas are identified, can extraction of the antibiotics then be carried out to reduce AMR development. Molecularly imprinted polymer (MIPs) are synthetic recognition elements produced through the biomarker of interest being used as a template in order to manufacture tailor‐made ligand selective polymeric recognition sites. They are emerging steadily as a viable alternative to antibiotics, especially given their low‐cost, superior thermal and chemical stability that facilitates on‐site detection, simplified manufacturing process, and avoiding the use of animals in the production process. In this paper, the authors critically review literature from primarily 2010–2020 on rational design approaches used to develop MIPs for sensing and extraction of antibiotics, providing an outlook on crucial issues that need to be tackled to bring MIPs for antibiotic sensing to the market.

A Note about Crosslinking Density in Imprinting Polymerization

“…Most commonly, imprinting polymerization is based on non-covalent forces, but covalent and semi-covalent imprinting has also been reported [ 27 ]. There are variations in where the imprinting occurs (bulk imprinting or surface imprinting [ 28 ]), as well as what materials are used (polymeric materials, inorganic materials [ 29 ] or hybrid materials [ 30 , 31 ]).…”

Remediation of pharmaceuticals from wastewater via computationally selected molecularly imprinted polymers

“…A wide variety of computational techniques are applicable for MIPs, a comprehensive appraisal of computational technics in the field has been recently compiled by Nicholls et al , 28 and specifically for the detection of antibiotics in environmental and food samples by us and coworkers. 29 One prevalent approach is functional monomer selection through screening via molecular mechanics, where the TM and FM interactions in vacuum are characterised by binding energies scores. 30 Quantum mechanics methods, such as density functional theory (DFT), have become more widespread, as they offer a transferable approach to determine the TM and FM energy interactions at the cost of higher resource utilisation compared to classical methods.…”

“…It is our ambition that the compiled protocol presented here will assist the computational tasks, boosting this trend, as currently less than 5% of the experimental MIP synthesis are supported by insights gained from simulations. 28,29…”

Selective Detection of Penicillin G Antibiotic in Milk by Molecularly Imprinted Polymer-Based Plasmonic SPR Sensor

“…MIPs are suitable for molecular recognition, which is the reason for much of the interest in MIPs. The main advantage of MIPs is their ability to detect the target molecule with high selectivity even in the presence of other similar structures [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ]. Therefore, MIPs are used as unique technology for the detection of biological molecules in sensors.…”