Development of a molecularly imprinted polymer based surface plasmon resonance sensor for theophylline monitoring

Molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) thin films and surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensing technologies were combined to develop a novel sensing platform for monitoring real-time theophylline concentration, which is a compound of interest in environmental monitoring and a molecular probe for phenotyping certain cytochrome P450 enzymes. The MIPs hydrogel is easy to synthesize and provides shape-selective recognition with high affinity to specific target molecules. Different polymerization formulas were tested and optimized. The influence of the monomer sensitive factors were addressed by SPR. SPR is an evanescent wave optics based sensing technique that is suitable for real-time and label free sensing purposes. Gold nanorods (Au NRs) were uniformly immobilized onto a SPR sensing surface for the construction of a fiber optics based prism-free localized SPR (LSPR) measurement. This technique can be also applied to assess the activities of other small organic molecules by adjusting the polymerization formula, thus, this approach also has many other potential applications.