Highly selective and sensitive analysis of dopamine by molecularly imprinted stir bar sorptive extraction technique coupled with complementary molecularly imprinted polymer sensor.

This paper reports a combination of molecularly imprinted stir bar sorptive extraction and complementary molecularly imprinted polymer-sensor for the analysis of dopamine as a biomarker of several neurodegenerative diseases occurred at ultra trace level. This exploited iniferter initiated polymerization via "surface grafting-from" approach onto magnetic stir bar (for sorptive extraction) and multiwalled carbon nanotubes-ceramic electrode (for detection). Such hyphenation helped dual pre-concentration of dopamine in aqueous, biological and pharmaceutical samples. This enabled high sensitivity to achieve the stringent limit [limit of detection: 4.9ngL(-1), RSD=2.4%, S/N=3, cerebrospinal fluid] of clinical detection, without any problems of non-specific contributions and cross-reactivity.