Development of sensor systems for sulfamethoxazole determination

Antibiotics are chemical agents used to treat contagious diseases. These agents are consumed in large quantities every year for various purposes in both veterinary and human health. But the mixing of these agents into the environment and food causes many problems. For this reason, it is of great importance to learn the amount of these compounds in foods and environmental sources Such determinations are usually made in laboratories by the traditional method of analysis, and these methods have disadvantages such as the need for trained personel, the use of expensive equipment, a long analysis time, and the fact that some analyses require pre-processing which is both labor and time consuming. In this study, we developed surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor chip that fast reacting, highly selective, reusable and requires no pretreatment for detecting sulfamethoxazole. We used sulfamethoxazole imprinted polymer (MAA-HEMA-EGDMA) as a receptor in the SPR chip. Before molecular imprinting we also used B3LYP hybrid theory with 6-31+g(d, p) basis set to examine monomer and template to determine best template-monomer ratio. After developing molecular imprinted nanofilm coated SPR chip we characterized it with SEM and did adsorption studies on both standard sulfamethoxazole solution and commercial milk samples. According to data, for sensor LOD and LOQ values are calculated as 0.0011 µg/L and 0.0034 µg/L respectively.