Molecular imprinting and grafting of n-acetylneuraminic acid in synthetic polymers for virus targeting

• Autor(a) principal: Noronha, Verônica Teixeira
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/24737
• topic: Molecularly imprinted polymers; N-acetylneuraminic acid; Molecular recognition; Thiobarbituric acid method; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Química

In this work, the synthesis of Molecularly Imprinted Polymers (MIPs) was executed using different solvents, N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF), Acetonitrile (ACN), and a mixture of both reagents, two different monomers, 4-vinylpiridine (4VP) and 4-Vinylphenilboronic acid (4VBA), and different concentrations of solutions for the template, N-acetylneuraminic acid, in order to evaluate which conditions would lead to a final synthetic material with higher retentions of N-acetylneuraminic acid. The characterization of the synthesised MIPs was performed beginning with batch adsorption, allowing the material to react and adsorb the target molecule until reaching an equilibrium. After two methods were chosen to quantify the N-acetylneuraminic acid, to evaluate the retention of this molecules for each of the MIPs. The methods used were derivatisation with thiobarbituric acid (TBA) followed by ultraviolet (UV) spectroscopy and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). MIPs were evaluated under different N-acetylneuraminic acid concentrations and different pH conditions. It was concluded that high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was the most reliable and efficient method to quantify N-acetylneuraminic acid, once derivatization with thiobarbituric acid approach has various steps that could be error prone. In addition, MIPs produced with 4-vinylpiridine showed a higher N-acetylneuraminic acid adsorption in the analysed conditions. Furthermore, MIP synthesised using only N,N-dimethylformamide as solvent, and N-acetylneuraminic acid in a concentration of 0.06 mol/L as a template, exhibited a higher retention of this compound, specially at acid pHs.