Fabrication of Atrazine Molecularly Imprinted Polymer Microsphere by Two Step Seed Swelling Polymerization Method

Atrazine molecularly imprinted polymer microspheres (MIPMs) were fabricated by two step seed swelling polymerization method, using atrazine as a template molecule, methacrylic acid (MAA) as a functional monomer, ethylene glycol dimethacrylate (EDMA) as a crosslinking agent and toluene/dodecanol as a porogenic agent and a series of MIPMs with even particle size of 3-5 mu m and good dispersivity could be obtained under the optimal condition. Equilibrium binding experiments were comparably studied about the binding capacity of the resulted polymers. We packed the polymers into empty chromatographic steel tube columns (2.1 min I.D. x 10 cm) to prepare liquid chromatographic columns used for the evaluation of specificity with similar structure compounds. The proposed method has been successfully applied to the determination of limited atrazine in water samples. The results showed that a good linear relationship of atrazine was maintained within 0.1-20 mg/L (r = 0.9992), the sample recovery was in a range of 92.1-102.0%, with a RSD lower than 5% (n = 6) and a detection limit of 0.041 mg/L.