Latest developments in the detection and separation of bovine serum albumin using molecularly imprinted polymers

Recently, enormous attention has been focused on the development of protein-molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs). In this sense, bovine serum albumin (BSA) is well regarded as a favorite template in various MIPs-based biochemical/analytical assays mainly due to its low price, easy availability, and high structural homology to human serum albumin (HSA). Equally, the implications of BSA in the pathology of different human-related disorders necessitate the development of methods for its precise detection in biological samples. Accordingly, the current review seeks to provide an update on the design, synthesis, and characterization of the developed MIPs which have used BSA as template protein. Also, the recognition and quantification of BSA in different real samples using the prepared MIPs are discussed. Additionally, main strategies, such as surface imprinting, epitope-MIPs, microcontact imprinting and other methods to overcome the problems associated with the molecular printing of BSA are discussed here. The final discussion provides a comparative exploration of different approaches developed, emphasizing their relative advantages and disadvantages and underlining developments and possible future directions.