Molecularly imprinting: a tool of modern chemistry for analysis and monitoring of phenolic environmental estrogens

Phenolic environmental estrogen (PEE) is one of the most common endocrine disrupting chemicals whose interference with the normal function of the endocrine system in animals and humans raised concern to their potential impact on wildlife and humans health. Research on PEEs calls for a high selectivity analytical methods. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are synthetic polymers having a predetermined selectivity for a given analyte, or group of structurally related compounds, which make them ideal materials to be used in analysis of PEEs. During the past few years, a huge amount of papers have been published dealing with the use of MIPs in the analysis of PEEs. In this review, we focus on the recent applications of MIPs to analyze PEEs. We describe the preparation of MIPs and discuss different methods of polymerization. We highlight the latest applications of MIPs in the analysis of PEEs, including nanomaterial MIPs as sorbent for solid-phase extraction and MIPs as electrochemical sensors. This review provides a good platform for the analysis and monitoring of PEEs in complicated matrixes and offers suggestions for future success in the field of MIPs