Capacitive Electrochemical Sensor with Molecularly Imprinted Polymer for Determination of Heterocyclic Aromatic Amines

Quinoxaline heterocyclic aromatic amines (HAAs), are formed during meat and fish cooking, frying, or grilling at high temperatures. HAAs are classified as potent hazardous carcinogens, even though the HAAs are usually generated at very low concentrations (~ng per g of a food sample). This is because the HAA food contaminants effectively damage DNA by intercalation or strand break. Hence, chronic exposure to HAAs, even in low doses, can cause cancers of the lung, stomach, breast, etc. Currently, HPLC is used for the determination of these toxins in food matrices. However, this technique is expensive, tedious, and time-consuming. Therefore, fast, simple, inexpensive, and reliable HAAs determination procedures, without the need for separation of these toxins, in the protein food matrices are in demand. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are excellent examples of bio-mimicking recognition materials. Therefore, they have found numerous applications in selective chemosensing. Within the present project, we synthesized a nucleobase-functionalized molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) as the recognition unit of an electrochemical sensor for selective DPV and capacitive detection and determination of 2-amino-3,7,8-trimethyl-3H-imidazo[4,5-f]quinoxaline (7,8-DiMeIQx) HAA. MIP-(7,8-DiMeIQx) film-coated electrodes were sensitive and selective to 7,8-DiMeIQx. The linear dynamic concentration range of the devised chemosensor extended from 12 µM to 0.4 mM 7,8-DiMeIQx and the imprinting factor was high, IF = 13. The present work is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 711859. Scientific work was funded from the financial resources for science in the years 2017-2021 awarded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education for the implementation of an international co-financed project and National Science Centre Poland (grant No. NCN 2014/15/B/NZ7/01011 to W.K.)