Electrochemical-assisted synthesis of molecularly imprinted graphene oxide/magnetite for highly selective enantiomer separation

Enantiomeric compounds have been reported to exhibit different biological and pharmacological activities. MIP-GO/Fe₃O₄ has been synthesized with L-glutamic acid (L-Glu) as template molecules and developed to separate amino acids enantiomeric compounds (AAs) especially for DL-glutamic acid (DL-Glu). The MIP-GO/Fe₃O₄ adsorbent material was synthesized in several stages, namely electrochemically synthesizing GO, co-precipitation for GO/Fe₃O₄, and surface imprinting polymerization to obtain MIP-GO/Fe₃O₄. The characterization results of MIP-GO/Fe₃O₄ show that the composite system has been successfully created with saturation magnetization (Ms) values of 49.37 emu/g. Adsorption tests are carried out on the racemic mixture of DL-Glu and show that the material worked effectively and selectively to separate D- and L-Glu with a %ee value of 97.86 % and an adsorption capacity for L of 9.9 mg g⁻¹ on optimum conditions. In addition, the adsorbent developed shows good reusability values with a decreasing performance of no more than 2.0 % after 10-time use cycles and is easily separated in less than 15 s. This research contributes to developing advanced materials with extraordinary selectivity and efficiency, paving the way for advances in enantiomer separation technology.