Molecularly imprinted polymers for bioanalytical sample preparation

Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIP) are stable polymers with molecular recognition abilities, provided by the presence of a template during their synthesis, and are excellent materials with high selectivity for sample preparation in bioanalytical methods. This short review discusses aspects of MIP preparation and its applications as a sorbent material in pharmaceutical and biomedical analysis. MIP in different extraction configurations, including classical solid-phase extraction, solid-phase microextraction, magnetic molecularly imprinted solid-phase extraction, microextraction by packed sorbent and solid-phase extraction in pipette tips, are used to illustrate the good performance of this type of sorbent for sample preparation procedures of complex matrices, especially prior to bioanalytical approaches. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.