Some intrinsic advantages, such as structural predetermination, long-term stability, wide applicability, specific recognition, added to the superiority of cost and preparation technology, make imprinted polymers (IPs) displaying potential application prospect in separation science, solid phase extraction, chromatographic separation, drug controlled release, chemical sensing, environmental detection, electrochemistry, membrane separation and many other fields, which, in fact, provide a foundation material basis and technical support for the accurate separation of templates. Nowadays, with the concept of sustainable development and circular economy accepted increasingly. IPs will be focused more as a research hotspot in the field of high performance functional materials inevitably. However, IPs prepared by the traditional method is a highly cross-linked polymer, and the high cross-linking degree endowing IPs advantages of stable structure and strong recognition. However, owing to the simple and mechanical molecular recognition mechanism resulted from high cross-linking degree, IPs prepared by traditional method lacked the necessary "flexibility" and sufficient sensitivity to external stimulation conditions, which resulted in the difficulty to balance the desorption rate, selectivity and reusability during the separation and purification process, and further limited them application in practical industrial separation. In recent years, researchers' interest has gradually shifted to smart imprinted polymers that can improve the "flexibility" of traditional IPs. A new type of functional material, namely smart imprinted polymers (S-IPs), was prepared by combining smart polymers (SPs) with imprinted polymers (IPs). It not only has the specific selectivity of common imprinted polymers, but also has the characteristics of responsiveness to external stimuli and reversibility of deformation, which makes them more excellent in adsorption and desorption. Research on S-IPs had achieved series of exciting results. Studies had successfully prepared temperature-sensitive IPs (T-IPs), magnetically responsive IPs (M-IPs), pH-sensitive IPs (pH-IPs), photoresponsive IPs (P-IPs) and dual-sensitive IPs (pH-M IPs, pH-T IPs, TM IPs, PM IPs, etc.) and multiple-sensitivity S-IPs, and all above had presented strong prospects in areas such as drug delivery, biotechnology, separation science and sensor etc. This paper mainly reviews the research progress of S-IPs in intelligent mechanism and preparation method. Finally, key bottlenecks that hold back the development of S-IPs are summarizes, and the potential development prospect is concerned. © 2020, Materials Review Magazine. All right reserved.
