Fabrication and application of molecularly imprinted polymer doped carbon dots coated silica stationary phase.

Facing the difficulties in chromatographic separation of polar compounds, this investigation devotes to developing novel stationary phase. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) have aroused wide attention, owing to their outstanding selectivity, high stability, and low cost. In this work, a novel stationary phase based on carbon dots (CDs), MIP layer, and silica beads was synthesized to exploit high selectivity of MIPs, excellent physicochemical property of CDs, and outstanding chromatographic performances of silica microspheres simultaneously. The MIP doped CDs coated silica (MIP-CDs/SiO) stationary phase was systematically characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) surface area measurement, and carbon elemental analysis. Furthermore, the chromatographic performance of the MIP-CDs/SiO column was thoroughly assessed by using a wide variety of compounds (including nucleosides, sulfonamides, benzoic acids, and some other antibiotics). Meanwhile, the separation efficiency of the MIP-CDs/SiO stationary phase was superior to other kinds of stationary phases (e.g. nonimprinted NIP-CDs/SiO, MIP/SiO, and C18-SiO). The results demonstrated that MIP-CDs/SiO column exhibited best performance in terms of chromatographic separation. For all tested compounds, the resolution value was not less than 1.60, and the column efficiency of MIP-CDs/SiO for thymidine was 22,740 plates/m. The results further indicate that the MIP-CDs/SiO column can combine the good properties of MIP, CDs, with those of silica microbeads. Therefore, the developed MIP-CDs/SiO stationary phase can be applied in the separation science and chromatography-based techniques.