Aerosol polymerisation methods method V in Table

Unfortunately, a variety of chemical functionalities, including carboxylic acids and nitrogenous bases, inhibited the cationic polymerisation mechanism and were thus incompatible since they slowed down the polymerisation too much. The technique is, therefore, somewhat limited in the range of functional monomers and templates which could be used, but the technique points the way towards a broader-minded approach to both the chemistry and technology of molecular imprinting. 

7 Surface rearrangement of latex particles (method VI in Table 12.1) 

By optimising conditions, a range of transition metal cations have been imprinted using the surface rearrangement approach. The capacity is reasonable, since the small size of the latex (typically 0.5 pm. diameter) gives a high overall surface area. Detailed methodology and results will not be discussed here since they 

While this approach to surface imprinting is attractive, it has only been demonstrated for metal ion imprinting to date. If the technique could be extended to encompass small organic molecules then it would have far greater impact, and would have particular relevance to agglutination type assays, and use with tagged macromolecules, where access to surface-localised binding sites is crucial. 

Polymerisation in supercritical carbon dioxide has generated great interest in recent years for a number of reasons, including its environmentally benign nature as a solvent and the ease of removing it from products at the end of a reaction, as well as more subtle issues such as the tuneability of its density and solvation 

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