Fabricating magnetic hydrophilic molecularly imprinted resin with enhanced adsorption and recognition performance for targeted detecting chlorophenols in environmental water

Constructing imprinting materials with excellent aqueous-recognition ability is a long-term challenge in imprinting fields. Hydrophilic molecularly imprinted materials have been capturing extensive attentions of material scientists, environmental experts and analytical chemists due to their excellent anti-matrix interference and aqueous-recognition ability. Herein, adopting resorcinol and melamine as double hydrophilic monomers, formaldehyde as hydrophilic crosslinker, 2,4,6-trichlorophenol as template and amino functionalized magnetic graphene oxide as substrate, a hydrophilic magnetic molecularly imprinted resin (MMIR) with enhanced adsorption and recognition performance was fabricated for the first time via integrating two-step template immobilization strategy with surface imprinting. The obtained MMIR was applied as magnetic solid phase extraction adsorbent to targeted separation of trace chlorophenols in complex environmental water samples combined with HPLC-UV detection. The mainly preparation conditions and extraction conditions were investigated in detail. Meanwhile, the physicochemical properties and isotherm/selective/kinetic adsorption were systematically explored. The MMIR exhibits excellent magnetic/hydrophilicity/selectivity/adsorptivity/reusability, and the established method presents low LODs (0.056–0.102 μg L-1), high recoveries (91–100%), wide linearity (0.5–100 μg L-1, R2 ≥ 0.991), excellent precision and accuracy for the five chlorophenols. The research provides a new sight on the development of eminent hydrophilic molecularly imprinted composites and the establishment of more efficient sample separation techniques for control/monitor/detection of target pollution in complex water environment.