Custom design of electronic tongues based on electropolymerized molecularly imprinted polymers

Electrochemical sensors modified with molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) opens the room for developing a new type of electronic tongues (ETs). MIPs can be the basis for tailor-selective sensors, and potential deviations may be corrected with the modelling performance of advanced data treatment. In this direction, this work aims to provide a generic protocol for the development of MIP-based ETs towards any given analyte by taking advantage of the synthetic nature of MIPs. For this purpose, electropolymerization of pyrrole is explored as a facile approach for the preparation of the MIP-based sensor array, facilitating the direct integration of MIPs with voltammetric sensors. To illustrate its potential, two different quantitative applications in the pharmaceutical field are presented: the analysis of paracetamol and ascorbic acid in drug formulations and the analysis of antibiotics in urine samples. In both cases, samples were analysed by differential pulse voltammetry (DPV), without any other pre-treatment than its dilution in buffer. The use of MIPs provide significant improvements in performance vs. the use of bare or catalyst-modified sensors.