Novel nanoporous carbon materials for adsorption gibberellic acid from solution

Gibberellic acid (GA) is one kind of ubiquitous phytohormones that regulates various developmental processes of the plant growth. Monitoring and controlling the phytohormone is very important to ensure the efficient growth of crops to bring a high yield and quality production in agriculture or horticulture. Since the content of phytohormone in a plant is very low, and easily decomposed by heat, light, and oxygen, it is of considerable interest to the phytohormone research to prepare some specific absorbants for adsorption of phytohormone molecules from the solution. Here, novel nanoporous carbon with tailored pore structure has been synthesized, by dynamic carbonization with silica gel networks as a template, which was formed in sol-gel polycondensation using tetraethoxy silane as a silica precursor and sucrose as a carbon source. The pore structures of this kind of nanoporous carbon can be tunable to a high pore volume of 1.26 cm3/g and a large specific area of 1744 m2/g, which provides an adsorption capacity about 6.8 mg/g to the GA in a solution within 9 h reaction time, and it is over three to four times higher than those to protein and starch in the same solution. This indicated that the prepared nanoporous carbon materials have potential application as a novel absorbent in the separation and purification of GA from the solution for monitoring assay.