Sol-Gel Imprinted Polymers Based Electrochemical Sensor for Paracetamol Recognition and Detection

Abstract

Molecular imprinting and sol-gel technique were combined to develop a molecular imprinted polymer (MIP) based electrochemical sensor in this work. With the successive modification of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) and gold nanoparticles (GNPs), a modified glassy carbon electrode (GCE) was immersed in a sol-gel solution in the presence of paracetamol (PR) for the electropolymerization to fabricate an imprinted sensor. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), and differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) were employed to characterize the constructed sensor. The factors for the sensor preparation, the electropolymerization potential range, the monomer concentration, and the scan rate for the sensor preparation were optimized. The sensor displayed an excellent recognition capacity toward PR compared with other analogues. Additionally, the DPV peak current was linear to the PR concentration in the range from 8.0 × 10⁻⁸ to 5.0 × 10⁻⁵ mol/L, with a detection limit of 4.0 × 10⁻⁸ mol/L. The prepared sensor also showed satisfactory reproducibility and regeneration capacity.

Keywords:

• Electrochemical sensor
• Gold nanoparticles
• Molecularly imprinted polymers
• Multi-walled carbon nanotubes
• Paracetamol
• Sol-gel technique

Acknowledgments

We greatly appreciate the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China for the young program (21005002), the Anhui Provincial Natural Science Foundation for the Young Program (11040606Q35), the Anhui University Provincial Natural Science Foundation Key program (KJ2010A138).