Molecularly imprinted polymer-coated silicon nanowires for protein specific recognition and fast separation

Nanomaterials have offered an opportunity for molecular imprinting to extract templates easily and achieve large binding capacity. In this paper, silicon nanowires were employed as the reinforcement material in protein molecular imprinting with dopamine as the monomer and bovine hemoglobin as the template molecule. In the experiments, the imprinted nanowires showed fast adsorption kinetics (took up 75% of the equilibrium amount during only 5 min), significant selectivity and large binding capacity (213.7 mg g(-1)) for the template protein. Furthermore, the stability and regeneration were also investigated, which indicated that the imprinted nanowires had outstanding reusability.