Oriented surface epitope imprinted polymer-based quartz crystal microbalance sensor for cytochrome c

A quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) sensor for detecting cytochrome c based on an oriented surface epitope imprinted polymer was fabricated in this paper. By using the palmitic acid-modified epitope of cytochrome c as the template and the 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane as the monomer, we prepared a new oriented surface epitope imprinted polymer by the reverse microemulsion polymerization. The prepared oriented imprinted polymer had better imprinting effect than the non-oriented imprinted polymer. And compared to previous studies, this polymerization method is simple and could be carried out at room temperature in the presence of oxygen, under regular atmospheric conditions. Then, by combining the advantages of molecularly imprinted polymers and QCM sensors, we used the prepared polymer to establish a QCM sensor. The described sensor showed good sensitivity and selectivity towards cytochrome c. The linear range was from 0.005 μg mL-1 to 0.050 μg mL-1 and the detection limit was 3.6 ng mL-1 which is lower than most of previous works. Besides, it could be used for real sample analysis and had satisfactory reproducibility and accuracy. This work proposed a new way of fabricating oriented surface epitope imprinted polymers-based QCM sensors for selectively detecting proteins at very low concentrations.