Designing Molecularly Imprinted Polymers for sensing proteins is still a somewhat empirical process due to the inherent complexity of protein imprinting. Based on Bovine Serum Albumin as a model analyte, we explored the influence of a range of experimental parameters on the final sensor responses. The optimized polymer contains 70% cross linker. Lower amounts lead to higher sensitivity, but also sensor response times substantially increase (to up to 10 h) at constant imprinting effect (signal ratio MIP/NIP on quartz crystal microbalance-QCM). However, by shifting the polymer properties to more hydrophilic by replacing methacrylic acid by acrylic acid, part of the decreased sensitivity can be recovered leading to appreciable sensor responses. Changing polymer morphology by bulk imprinting and nanoparticle approaches has much lower influence on sensitivity.
Keywords: QCM; molecular imprinted polymer; polymer optimization; protein imprinting.