Synthesis and characterization of a novel quercetin magnetic molecularly imprinted polymer via reversible addition fragmentation chain transfer strategy

Molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) will be modified on the surface of the core-shell structure silica magnetic nanoparticles, during which quercetin is used as a template molecule, acrylamide as a functional monomer, azo-bisisobutyronitrile as an initiator and ethylene glycol dimethacrylate as a cross-linker, to synthesize highly efficient and selective quercetin magnetic molecularly imprinted nanoparticles via Reversible Addition-Fragmentation chain Transfer (RAFT) polymerization. FT-IR and X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns are used to monitor the reaction and show the characteristic groups of each reaction step. Compared with the conventional bulk polymerization (2.7029mg/g), the adsorption test showed that the MMIP by RAFT activity controlled polymerization had better absorption capacity for quercetin which the saturated adsorption amount was 4.8471mg/g. Kinetic studies indicate that pseudo first order model is suitable to describe the adsorption mechanism. Thermodynamics experiment revealed that Langmuir model was more applied for explains the adsorption of quercetin onto magnetic molecularly imprinted polymer.