Molecularly imprinted layer-coated monodisperse spherical silica microparticles toward affinity-enrichment of isoflavonoid glycosides from Radix puerariae.

This paper reports the preparation of puerarin (PR) imprinted layer-coated silica microparticles toward selective recognition of PR and fast affinity-enrichment of the main isoflavonoid glycosides from the crude extract of Radix puerariae. Before the preparation, quantum mechanics (QM) method was applied to identify three kinds of common functional monomers capable of interaction with PR and then predicted optimal functional monomer (acrylamide, AA) and the relative molar ratio of template to functional monomer (PR/AA, 1:4). The obtained PR-imprinted silica microparticles were evaluated by transmission electron microscope (TEM) and rebinding experiments, exhibiting good morphology and high binding affinity to PR. Meanwhile, the rebinding amount of the imprinted microparticles to PR was nearly 2.1-folds that of non-imprinted microparticles. When the PR-imprinted microspheres were used as packing materials for solid-phase extraction, the recovery yields of PR, daidzin (DD) and genistin (GS) were simultaneously up to 90% by one-step extraction from the crude extract of Radix puerariae. Additionally, the PR-imprinted microparticles could be re-used for at least 5 times without losing any extraction efficiency. These results indicate that the PR-imprinted microparticles have highly selective adsorption capabilities to PR, DD and GS from the crude extract of Radix puerariae. The method of molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) coupled with solid-phase extraction (SPE) provides a good solution of the enrichment and separation of active extracts from complicated traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) with certain structures.