Fullerene derived molecularly imprinted polymer for chemosensing of adenosine-5′-triphosphate (ATP)

For molecular imprinting of oxidatively electroactive analytes by electropolymerization, we used herein reductively electroactive functional monomers. As a proof of concept, we applied C₆₀ fullerene adducts as such for the first time. For that, we derivatized C₆₀ to bear either an uracil or an amide, or a carboxy addend for recognition of the adenosine-5′-triphosphate (ATP) oxidizable analyte with the ATP-templated molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP-ATP). Accordingly, the ATP complex with all of the functional monomers formed in solution was potentiodynamically electropolymerized to deposit an MIP-ATP film either on an Au electrode of the quartz crystal resonator or on a Pt disk electrode for the piezoelectric microgravimetry (PM) or capacitive impedimetry (CI) determination of ATP, respectively, under the flow-injection analysis (FIA) conditions. The apparent imprinting factor for ATP was ∼4.0. After extraction of the ATP template, analytical performance of the resulting chemosensors, including detectability, sensitivity, and selectivity, was characterized. The limit of detection was 0.3 and 0.03 mM ATP for the PM and CI chemosensor, respectively. The MIP-ATP film discriminated structural analogues of ATP quite well. The Langmuir, Freundlich, and Langmuir–Freundlich isotherms were fitted to the experimental data of the ATP sorption and sorption stability constants appeared to be nearly independent of the adopted sorption model.