Use of Micro- and Nanodimensional Inorganic Materials in Surface Molecular Imprinting

A review of methods of surface molecular imprinting using micro- and nanodimensional inorganic materials, including nanostructured ones, as substrates and methods of their application to analysis for increasing the selectivity and sensitivity of the determination. Molecularly imprinted polymers play an increasingly important role in the development of methods for the separation and preconcentration of organic substances and inorganic ions. Their main advantage over traditional adsorbents used in analytical chemistry consists in a combination of adsorption properties with the selective recognition of template molecules or related compounds. Recently much attention has been paid to surface molecular imprinting as a technology ensuring not only an increase in the efficiency of the selective preconcentration of analytes, but also in the sensitivity of their subsequent determination in complex matrixes, and also the reduction of the cost of the adsorbent material using substrates for preparing thin films of molecularly imprinted polymers on their surface.