Preparation of silver with an ultrathin molecular imprinted layer for detection of carbendazim by SERS

A large number of pesticides left in the crops and water affect the environment and human health. The combination of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) technology and molecular imprinting technology (MIT) was presented to apply to the detection of target molecules in water. However, the thickness of the imprinted layer and the inhomogeneity of the shell package have a great influence on SERS detection. To overcome the above problems, a new method is proposed to control the imprinted layer within 5 nm by taking the large-scale Ag as the core, reducing the amount of reagent, increase the oscillation time of polymerization, and so on. The obtained Ag@molecular imprinted polymers (Ag@MIPs) were applied for rapid detection of carbendazim. Besides, the SERS intensity of Ag@MIPs for carbendazim was higher than that of Ag, exhibiting limit detection as low as 1 × 10−9 M. Also, Ag@MIPs is used as SERS substrate achieved high selectively and satisfactory reusability. Based on the above, the experiment results proved that the Ag@MIPs with a thin imprinted layer provided a reliable approach for carbendazim detection.