Designing composite cryogel carriers for tyrosine adsorption

•Design and development of composite carrier using imprinted magnetic silica microspheres.•High adsorption ability of tyrosine with excellent reusability.•Specific recognition of tyrosine towards other amino acids with high selectivity. Cryogels have been extensively utilized in multiple biomedical and bioengineering approaches due to their high adsorption capacity, macroporosity, high flexibility, and long durability. In particular, composite cryogels hold great potential in terms of easy fabrication, high selectivity, specificity, and reusability parameters. Herein, molecularly imprinted magnetic silica microspheres are prepared and embedded in cryogels to develop a new composite carrier for adsorption of tyrosine-a crucial chemical in umpteen cellular mechanisms including brain regulation, mood control, stress level reduction, melanin pigment production, and thyroid functions regulation-. Through surface-sensitive characterizations, composite cryogel carriers are performed to obtain optimum tyrosine adsorption conditions, and the maximum adsorption capacity is reported as 62.27 mg/g in pH 8.0 phosphate buffer solution. The reusability is tested with serial adsorption–desorption steps using 0.1 M NaCl presenting that the composite cryogel carrier can be used more than eight times without losing the performance. Competitive binding tests with different amino acids demonstrate high selectivity of the composite cryogel carrier. Langmuir isotherm model is well fitted to the adsorption data.