MOLECULAR IMPRINTING described as a method utilized to create artificial receptors and antibodies by construction of selective recognition sites in a synthetic polymer can be a promising tool for generating peptide and protein artificial specific recognition sites. These materials, as potential antibody substitutes, have attracted great interest and attention in different fields such as peptide and protein purification and separation, chemical/electrochemical/optical sensors/biosensors, chromatographic stationary phases, and enzyme mimics. This review has focused on fundamentals of MOLECULARly imprinted polymers in terms of selection of MOLECULAR template, functional monomer, cross linker, and polymerization format. Furthermore, several applications of peptide/protein-imprinted materials are highlighted and challenges regarding the intrinsic properties of peptide/ protein IMPRINTING have been emphasized.

MOLECULAR IMPRINTING is an emerging technology for the synthesis of polymeric materials which have specific recognition sites complementary to the target molecule. In the recent few years, MOLECULARly imprinted polymers are considered as the selective sorbents in detection, analytical processes and also drug delivery. There are some conventional methods commonly used in the components separation/recognition (i.e. qualitative or quantitative analysis in food and drugs industry) in natural or synthetic samples, however, there are some drawbacks, especially in complex samples, that limit the application of these methods. Recently, the use of MOLECULAR imprinted polymer due to high specific recognition, reliability and reusability, is growing rapidly and the technique has been successfully applied in various fields, ranging from food science, pharmaceutical, environmental science, arms industry and different sensors. It is also used to extract drugs, sugars, amino acids, toxins, pesticides and warfare agents. Although imprinted polymers have unique properties and can be easily prepared, the technique is still new to Iranian researchers, especially in food science field, and to improve and commercialize the technique, further attention and research is needed. In this paper, the concept of MOLECULAR IMPRINTING, synthesis and analysis approaches and its application in food sample analysis were comprehensively reviewed.

By using MOLECULAR farming, plants are used as a bio-reactor for producing low cost recombinant proteins. This technology had been successful in the production of primary products in the commercial field. Other recombinant products are in final steps of production. In the last 10 years, up to 100 different recombinant proteins are produced in transgenic plants. Plants have many advantages in comparison with other expression systems, especially in economic, safety, operations and production aspects. However, there are some problems for using plants as a bio-reactor with the goal of recombinant proteins production that should be considered. Some of these problems are: the quality of final product, extraction and the processing of plant derived pharmaceutical macromolecules and bio-safety. In this study, we will review the global view of MOLECULAR farming and some successful cases in Iran. During 8 years of research in the field of MOLECULAR farming in Iran, especially in Tarbiat Modarres University, different kinds of recombinant proteins such as VHH single domain antibody in tobacco and canola and tPA protein in tobacco were expressed. The human gamma interferon in canola and tobacco and also the luciferase enzyme in tobacco, African violet and canola were produced. Also, useful projects are executed in the field of transplastomic plants in order to express the mentioned genes in the chloroplast. In transferring the human pro-insulin gene to chloroplast genome, this gene was bombarded onto tobacco leaf ex-plants using a particle delivery system. Leaf ex-plants produced adventitious shoots when cultured on shoot-inducing medium containing spectinomycin. The results of peR confirmed that the pro-insulin gene was present in the chloroplast genome.

This work comprises an elaboration of novel MOLECULARly imprinted polymers (MIPs) films by non-covalent approach in presence of phenoxypropionic acid (PPA) as an analogue of 2, 4-D herbicide. MIPs were prepared by photo-polymerization of a mixture containing the n-butyl acrylate (BuA) as monomer, 1, 6 hexanediol diacrylate (HDDA) as cross-linker, PPA as template, 2-hydroxy-2-methyl-1-phenyl-propane-1-one as photoinitiator and chloroform as porogenic solvent. The computer modelling and 1H NMR analysis confirmed the presence of non-covalent hydrogen-bonding interactions between the template molecule and the monomer in pre-polymerization complex. Imprinted and non-imprinted polymers (NIPs) were characterized by infra-red spectroscopy (IR), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) techniques. The template extraction from MIP and the recognition properties of NIPs and MIPs were performed by gas chromatography (GC). The binding characteristics of MIPs, after removing the template were evaluated using equilibrium binding experiment and compared them with the corresponding NIPs. To acquire a maximum specific binding, factors such as the amount of polymer film, template concentration and cross-linking density were varied. In all cases, the binding experiment showed that the PPA imprinted polymer had better recognition ability than the non-imprinted polymer. As a result, MIP gave higher IMPRINTING effect at higher cross-linking density and lower PPA concentration when using 6 mg of polymer film mass. The resulting dummy MIPs exhibited selective recognition and satisfactory adsorption capacities of 2, 4-D in the solvent used for polymerization.