Preparation and characterization of magnetic molecularly imprinted polymer for specific adsorption of wheat gliadin

In this study, a magnetic molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) was successfully synthesized by surface imprinting technology for the specific recognition of wheat gliadin (GLI). MIPs showed an obvious hierarchical characteristic by investigations of micromorphology, the magnetic Fe3O4 core were wrapped with SiO2 layer (approximately 40 nm) and imprinted layer (approximately 10 nm). The results of vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM) proved the superparamagnetism of MIPs, which was contributed to the rapid magnetic separation. Furthermore, MIPs displayed excellent selective adsorption ability for GLI through adsorption kinetic model, adsorption isotherm model and adsorption selectivity experiment. The saturated adsorption capacity of MIPs to GLI was 73.55 mg/g under the optimized conditions and the imprinting factor was 3.10. The high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) manifested that the MIPs were successfully applied to separate template GLI from gluten, reflecting the excellent adsorption specificity of MIPs. Therefore, this research provided a promising method for rapidly separation and specific adsorption of GLI.