Molecular imprinting: An approach to ''tailor-made'' synthetic polymers with biomimetic functions

The recent development of synthetic polymers with biomimetic functions prepared by molecular imprinting is reviewed in this article. Molecular imprinting is based on template polymerization in which polymers are prepared in the presence of a template molecule to be imprinted. Resultant polymers record the shapes and chemical properties of the templates in their matrixes and exhibit antibody-like and enzyme-like activities. The most significant advantage of this technique is its simplicity: complementary sites for the target molecules which are expected to be specific binding/catalytic sites can be constructed with the aid of molecular self-assembly and no complicated synthesis is necessary. In this article, we present typical examples of molecularly imprinted polymers and especially focus on the effectiveness of molecular imprinted polymers as artificial antibodies and the potential as substrate-selective catalysts.