This award supports Mingdi Yan and students from Portland State University in a collaboration with Olof Ramstrom of the Department of Organic Chemistry at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. The project will focus on the difficult tasks of synthesis and use of in aqueous solutions of tailor-made polymeric receptors that are capable of selectively recognizing small differences in ligand structure. New chemistry and fabrication techniques will be applied to molecular imprinting in order to meet the challenge, which is of utmost importance in biological applications. The imprinting chemistry employs reversible, but stable bonds that survive the water environment. The technique of micromoulding in capillary will be used for the synthesis of molecularly imprinted polymers. The same technique will make it possible to accomplish the synthesis of libraries of such polymers that can be screened for optimal imprinting chemistry as well as for biological assays. The long-term goals of the project are to integrate the synthesis and analysis of combinatorial molecularly imprinted polymers on a single chip and to construct multi-analyte sensors based on the microfabricated arrays.
