Molecular imprinting technology for microorganism analysis

Molecular imprinting technology has been widely applied to various fields, owing to unique features of structure predictability, recognition specificity and application universality. Microorganism imprinting has attracted significant interests attributing to the high selectivity, simplicity rapidity, and excellent stability as well as low cost and eco-friendliness. Herein, we purpose to review the recent advances of MIT for microorganism analysis, concerning imprinting methods, analytical detection methods and typical applications. Various imprinting methods including direct and indirect imprinting for microorganism-MIPs preparation are comprehensively summarized. MIPs based biosensors containing fluorescence, electrochemical, piezoelectric and surface plasmon resonance for analytical detection of microorganisms is highlighted. Representative applications of microbiological imprinting are discussed, involving detection and quantification of bacteria, identification of bacterial species, and determination of yeast growth status. Finally, we propose the remaining challenges and future perspectives to accelerate the development and utilization of MIT in microorganism analysis and thereby push forwards microorganism identification and determination.