A molecularly imprinted polymer with integrated gold nanoparticles for surface enhanced Raman scattering based detection of the triazine herbicides, prometryn and simetryn.

A class-specific molecular imprinted polymer (MIP) is described for simultaneous recognition of prometryn and simetryn prior to their determination via a fingerprint signal (at 974 cm-1 and 1074 cm-1) in the surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) spectra that were acquired in the presence of gold nanoparticles. The imprinted nanoparticles were applied to the analysis of rice and wheat samples spiked with both herbicides. The method has fairly good recoveries (72.7-90.9%) with a relative standard deviation of 1.7-7.8%, and a 20 μg·kg-1 limit of detection. The imprint factors (compared to non-imprinted polymers) are 5.3 for prometryn and 4.2 for simetryn (both at 10 μg·mL-1 of the initial solution). Graphical abstract A MIP-SERS method was developed for simultaneous detection of triazine herbicides (prometryn and simetryn) in food samples.