Single-Template Molecularly Imprinted Chiral Sensor for Enantioselective Recognition of Various Chiral Amino Acids Based on a Dummy Template Strategy

Designing single-template molecularly imprinted chiral sensors for the enantioselective recognition of various chiral amino acids (AAs) is of great importance for chiral analysis. Here, a dummy template-based chiral sensor is developed by using l-alanine (l-Ala) as the dummy template and poly(o-phenylenediamine) as the imprinting layer, which can be used for the enantioselective recognition of various chiral AAs such as Ala, tryptophan (Trp), tyrosine (Tyr), cysteine (Cys), and arginine (Arg). Compared with conventional single-template molecularly imprinted chiral sensors, the designed single-template chiral sensor shows great universality for the recognition of chiral AAs since all chiral AAs possess an Ala-analogous segment. Also, in this work, it is found that the enantioselective recognition of different chiral AAs is greatly influenced by the sizes and isoelectric points of the AAs.