Solvothermal fabrication of adsorptive polymer monolith with large nanopores towards biomolecules immobilization

Reported in this paper is solvothermal fabrication of nanoporous polymer monolith for biomolecules adsorption. General functional groups such as carboxyl and amido could be easily introduced into the nanoporous polymers by in situ polymerization of divinylbenzene and the monomers of methacrylic acid or acrylamide. The synthesized polymers exhibit high BET surface areas (105–499 m2/g), large pore volumes (0.41–1.22 cm3/g), and large pore size (10–100 nm), which were quite suitable for biomolecules adsorption. As representative tests, myoglobin was chosen as a target adsorbate, and all these nanoporous polymers show much higher adsorptive capacities than conventional materials such as commercial resin (XAD-4) and activated carbon. Our nanoporous polymer monolith would be potentially important for enzyme immobilization.