Synthesis of thermo‐responsive bovine hemoglobin imprinted nanoparticles by combining ionic liquid immobilization with aqueous precipitation polymerization

Surface molecular imprinting over functionalized nanoparticles has proved to be an effective approach for construction of artificial nanomaterials for protein recognition. Herein, we report a strategy for synthesis of core–shell protein‐imprinted nanoparticles by the functionalization of nano‐cores with ionic liquids followed by aqueous precipitation polymerization to build thermo‐responsive imprinted polymer nano‐shells. The immobilized ionic liquids can form multiple interactions with the protein template. The polymerization process can produce thermo‐reversible physical crosslinks, which are advantageous to enhancing imprinting and facilitating template removal. With bovine hemoglobin as a model template, the imprinted nanoparticles showed temperature‐sensitivity in both dispersion behaviors and rebinding capacities. Compared with the ionic‐liquid‐modified core nanoparticles, the imprinted particles exhibited greatly increased selectivity and two orders of magnitude higher binding affinity for the template protein. The imprinted nanoparticles achieved relatively high imprinting factor up to 5.0 and specific rebinding capacity of 67.7 mg/g, respectively. These nanoparticles also demonstrated rapid rebinding kinetics and good reproducibility after five cycles of adsorption–regeneration. Therefore, the presented approach may be viable for the fabrication of high‐performance protein‐imprinted nanoparticles with temperature sensitivity.