Molecular imprinting of biological macromolecules and assemblies

Bio-imprinting polymeric receptors with and for biological macromolecules 

Arnold and co-workers proposed a novel and generic approach to prepare mole-cularly imprinted matrices for the selective recognition and binding of proteins [40], They used metal coordination interaction to induce complementary binding 

In order to address this problem in a systematic manner, they set out to prove this concept using structural analogues of proteins at the beginning [42]. Towards this end, they synthesised a number of small molecule bisimidazole derivatives (e.g. 2 and 3) as protein analogues. Metal coordinating functional monomers (e.g. 4) were prepared and cross-linking polymerisation reactions were carried out in the presence of these bisimidazole derivatives as the templates. After removal of the 

Mosbach and co-workers also attempted to use metal coordination interactions to prepare polymeric adsorbents for selective recognition of proteins [45]. Using the monomer 4, they polymerised the protein-monomer complex on methacrylate deri-vatised silica particles in the presence of ribonuclease A as the template protein. After removing the template, the imprinted functional silica particles were used as packing adsorbents in an HPLC column and the separation of lysozyme and ribonuclease A was carried out using this column. An enhanced affinity for the ribonuclease A was observed. 

---