Identificador: TDX:777
Autores: Caro Rubio, Ester
Resumen:
During the last years, one of the aims in the Analytical Chemistry has been the development of effective extraction techniques able to isolate and pre-concentrate the target analyte and at the same time to achieve an efficient clean-up of the sample. Among the different pre-concentration techniques, SPE is the technique that presents more advantages and for this reason SPE has been the most widely used pre-concentration technique during the last decades. SPE consists of percolating a known volume of a liquid sample through a stationary phase, named sorbent, and the sorbent is usually packed in a cartridge. In SPE exists several types of sorbents which are the responsible of the efficiency obtained during the extraction process. However, the major disadvantage of these sorbents is the low selectivity and as a consequence, matrix interference components are also co-extracted with the target analytes, which is mainly a problem when the analytes have to be extracted at low levels. For this reason, during the last years new selective materials have been also synthesised such as immunosorbents (IS) and molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs). Due to the growing interest to achieve selective extraction procedures and the novelty that MIPs represent, these materials are the objective of this thesis. Moreover it should be noted that MIPs offer several advantages over ISs, because MIPs can be obtained in a easy and rapid way, the synthetic procedure is quite cheap and they are also more stable under harsh conditions of pH and temperature.MIPs are tailored-made materials with specific cavities for a target molecule. The selectivity of the MIP arises because the target molecule, which is named template, is present during the polymerization. The template establishes selective interactions with the functional monomers and once the polymer has been formed, the template molecule is removed from the polymer matrix revealing selective binding sites (or imprints) in the polymer, which are complementary in size and functionality to the template molecule. As a consequence of these binding sites the MIP is able to selectively recognize the template molecule from other components in a complex sample. In this thesis, several MIPs have been synthesised, which have been applied as sorbents to the selective extraction of different compounds such as environmental pollutants (nitro- and chloro-phenols and naphthalene sulfonates) from river water or drugs (anti-inflammatories and antibiotics) from more complex matrices such as urine and tissue samples. The template molecule used has been chosen depending on its interest to be determined and also to explore the selectivity of the MIP for analytes with different characteristics. The good results obtained in each study demonstrate that MIPs can be synthesised for a wide variety of compounds and be applied in both environmental and biological fields.This Thesis has the European degree mention and it should be note that all the MIPs were prepared in the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow) in two stays that the PhD student did in this university.All the studies performed in this Thesis have been published in several international scientific journals, thus five of them have been published in the Journal of Chromatography A, one of them in the Journal of Chromatography B, another one in the Journal of Separation Science and in the Analytica Chimica Acta, and a review has been also published in the Trends in Analytical Chemistry.
Repositori URV