Preparation of molecular imprented polymers

Molecular recognition is crucially important as it aims to explain various formations especially in biological systems and the mechanism of the following incidences. Researchers have been trying to synthesize materials having the ability of molecular recognition by imitating this natural identification mechanism. One of the formation mechanisms of artificial biomolecules is the molecular imprinted polymers (MIP). Molecular imprinting technology is an effective and easy technique which develops expeditiously and enables polymers having specific molecular identification feature to be prepared. The preparation of molecular imprinted polymers go through these phases respectively: interaction with template molecule and functional monomers in a porogen, insertion of crosslinker into the medium, polymerization of the mixture by an agent which initiates polymerization, and removal of template molecule from polymer. In the method of molecular imprinting, interactions of the template molecule and functional monomers can be covalent or non-covalent and specific chemical structure occurs in the step of pre-polymerization. Various molecules such as proteins, peptides, amino acids, pesticides, coenzymes, hormones, nucleotide bases, steroids, carbohydrates and drugs can be used as a template molecule. Molecular imprinted polymers have various application fields such as extender material in solid phase extraction at first, trials of connection of discrete systems, biosensors and chromatografic separations. In this study, trifloxystrobin pesticide which is applied in different phases of preventing powdery mildew in grapes has been chosen as a template molecule. Trifloxystrobin, is an active agent from strobilurins group. Trifloxystrobin, which is derived from a mushroom species growing in natural environment, is a pesticide that prevents mitochondria respiration. By taking the molecular structure of trifloxystrobin into account, the polymers were constituted with the bulk polymerization method using functional monomers such as acrylamide, hydroxtethyl methacrylate (HEMA), 4-Vinylpyridine (4-Vpy), 1-Vinylimidazole (1-VI), crosslinker ethylene glycol dimethylacrylate (EGDMA), acetonitrile as a porogen and 1-1 Azobis-cyclohexanecarbonitrile as an initiator. After the polymers had been obtained, they were pressed, grinded and by washed with methanol-acetic acid (9:1), template molecule was separated from the polymer structure. Under the same circumstances, nonimprinted polymers (NIP) were prepared under the same conditions but without using the template molecule. The parameters like effect of pH, effect of incubation time, effect trifloxystrobin concentration on rebinding had been examined. Besides, recovery of trifloxystrobin pesticides from grape samples had been done by the using of imprinted polymer which had been prepared as a adsorbent material by the method of solid phase extraction. Keywords: Moleculer Imprinted Polymers, Pesticide, Trifloxystrobin, Rebinding Study, Solid Phase Extraction (SPE).