[Preparation of liquid crystal-based molecularly imprinted monolith and its molecular recognition thermodynamics].

Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) incorporated with liquid crystalline monomers can imprint and recognize templates at a very low level of crosslinking, thus addressing challenges associated with conventional MIPs, such as the embedding of the imprinted sites, low binding capacity, and slow mass transfer due to the high degree of crosslinking. Compared with traditional MIPs, the prepared MIPs have a greater number of easily binding sites, which can effectively overcome the embedding and low utilization of imprinting sites. Simultaneously, with a decrease in the level of chemical crosslinking, the mass transfer of template molecules can be significantly improved. However, the imprinting effect of liquid crystalline MIPs is generally weaker than that of traditional MIPs due to the low degree of crosslinking. Therefore, to obtain liquid crystalline MIPs with a good imprinting effect, a series of low-crosslinked liquid crystalline molecularly imprinted monoliths were prepared by graft polymerization and evaluated by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to systematically determine the relation between the polymerization parameters and the affinity of the resulting liquid crystalline MIPs. In this experiment, trimethylolpropane trimethacrylate (TRIM) was used to synthesize a monolithic column skeleton with toluene and dodecyl alcohol as porogens. (