Bioelectronic tongue using MIP sensors for the resolution of volatile phenolic compounds

The proposed approach reports the combined advantages of biosensors made of molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) and the modelling capabilities of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) in a bio-electronic tongue (BioET) analysis system for the very first time. Molecularly imprinted polymers taylor-made for 4-ethylphenol (4-EP) and 4-ethylguaiacol (4-EG) and their control polymers, non-imprinted polymers(NIPs), were succesfully synthesized with similar morphologies and integrated onto an electrochemical sensor surface, as the recognition element, via sol-gel immobilization. The resulting MIP-functionalized electrodes were employed to arrange an array of different biosensor electrodes to quantify by means of ANN the binary mixtures of 4-EP and 4-EG yielding an obtained vs. expected correlation coefficient >0.98 and a normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) <0.076 (external test subset). (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.