COMBINED IN-SILICO AND EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF MOLECULARLY IMPRINTED POLYMERS FOR SENSING 2,4,6-TRINITROTOLUENE (TNT)
Molecular imprinting is established as one of the most promising techniques to generate synthetic receptors with specific molecular recognition properties for target molecules. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are stable, tailor-made synthetic materials with binding affinities and selectivities comparable to those of antibodies. They have been used in different fields of application, for example in chemical sensors for hazardous materials1. Molecular imprinting is a templating process at the molecular level, which is based on the formation of a complex between the template molecule and selected functional monomer(s) in a given solvent, followed by polymerization in the presence of an appropriate cross-linker started by an initiator.
We describe a combined in-silico and experimental approach to the design of MIPs for 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT) via imprinting of a target analogue, trimesic acid. Functional monomer(s) for the template molecule were selected based on molecular modeling with different softwares (SYBYL X 2.12, Spartan3 and GROMACS4) yielding binding energies of the monomer-template complex formation. The computational approaches were validated by comparing in-silico binding energies to experimental data from nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC). This strategy not only tests the computational method used but also provides knowledge about monomer-template interactions in terms of affinity and thermodynamics, and about the relationship between pre-polymerization complex and the selectivity of the resulting MIP.
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