Particle-assisted semidirect breath figure method: a facile way to endow the honeycomb-structured petri dish with molecular recognition capability.

Recently, we have developed a semidirect breath figure (sDBF) method for direct fabrication of large-area and ordered honeycomb structures on commercial polystyrene (PS) Petri dishes without the use of an external polymer solution. In this work, we showed that both the pore size and the pore uniformity of the breath figure patterns were controllable by solvent amount. The cross-sectional image shows that only one layer of pores was formed on the BF figure patterns. By combing the sDBF method and Pickering emulsion and using the modular building blocks, we endowed the honeycomb-structured Petri dish with molecular recognition capability via the decoration of molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) nanoparticles into the honeycomb pores. The radioligand binding experiments show that the MIP nanoparticles on the resultant honeycomb structures maintained high molecular binding selectivity. The reusability study indicates that MIP-BF patterns had excellent mechanical stability during the radioligand binding process. We believe that the modular approach demonstrated in this work will open up further opportunities for honeycomb structure-based chemical sensors for drug analysis, substrates for catalysts, and scaffold for cell growth.