MIP in capillary electrophoresis.

One of Nature's most important talents is evolutionary development of systems capable of molecular recognition: distinguishing one molecule from another. Molecular recognition is the basis for most biological processes, such as ligand receptor binding, substrate-enzyme reactions and translation and transcription of the genetic code and is therefore of universal interest. Over the past four decades, researchers have been inspired by Nature to produce biomimetic materials with molecular recognition properties, by design rather than by evolution. A particularly exciting area of biomimetics is Molecular Imprinting which can be defined as process of template-induced formation of specific recognition sites (binding or catalytic) in a material where the template directs the positioning and orientation of the materials structural components by a self-assembling mechanism. The material itself could be oligomeric (the typical example is DNA replication process), polymeric (organic MIPs and inorganic imprinted silica gels) or 2-dimensional surface assembly