A computational approach to studying monomer selectivity towards the template in an imprinted polymer

A computational approach was proposed to study monomer-template interactions in a molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) in order to gain insight at the molecular level into imprinting polymer selectivity, regarding complex formation between template and monomer at the pre-polymerisation step. This is the most important step in MIP preparation. In the present work, chlorphenamine (CPA), diphenhydramine (DHA) and methacrylic acid (MAA), were chosen as the template, non-template, and monomer, respectively. The attained complexes were optimised, and changes in the interaction energies, atomic charges, IR spectroscopy results, dipole moment, and polarisability were studied. The effects of solvent on template-monomer interactions were also investigated. According to a survey of the literature, this is the first work in which dipole moment and polarisability were used to predict the types of interactions existing in pre-polymerisation complexes. In addition, the density functional tight-binding (DFTB) method, an approximate version of the density functional theory (DFT) method that was extended to cover the London dispersion energy, was used to calculate the interaction energy.