Molecular Recognition: Perspective and a New Approach

This perspective presents an overview of approaches to the preparation of molecular recognition agents for chemical sensing. These approaches include chemical synthesis, using catalysts from biological systems, partitioning, aptamers, antibodies and molecularly imprinted polymers. The latter three approaches are general in that they can be applied with a large number of analytes, both proteins and smaller molecules like drugs and hormones. Aptamers and antibodies bind analytes rapidly while molecularly imprinted polymers bind much more slowly. Most molecularly imprinted polymers, formed by polymerizing in the presence of a template, contain a high level of covalent crosslinker that causes the polymer to form a separate phase. This results in a material that is rigid with low affinity for analyte and slow binding kinetics. Our approach to templating is to use predominantly or exclusively noncovalent crosslinks. This results in soluble templated polymers that bind analyte rapidly with high affinity. The biggest challenge of this approach is that the chains are tangled when the templated polymer is dissolved in water, blocking access to binding sites.