Fabrication of Sustainable Boronate Affinity Membrane Derived from Rape Pollen Biomass and Cellulose Acetate for the Selective Separation of Shikimic Acid

Resource utilization of natural biomass is emerging as a dramatically efficient strategy in various fields due to the vigorous advocacy of environmental protection and sustainable development. Here, a boronate affinity imprinted membrane was developed via a facile, convenient, and green method using cost-effective cellulose acetate and environmentally friendly rape pollen (RP) biomass waste as the raw materials. The boronate affinity RP-based molecularly imprinted polymers (RP-MIPs) prepared via the surface imprinting strategy were incorporated into a cellulose acetate membrane (CAM) substrate to obtain the biomass-based imprinted membrane (RP-MIPs/CAM) for specific separation of shikimic acid (SA). The excellent skeleton structure of RP-MIPs and the dispersion of RP-MIPs in the CAM were confirmed. The resulting RP-MIPs/CAM was found to possess an acceptable binding capacity (55.03 mg g-1) under pH 7.5 and a rapid adsorption rate (60 min) toward SA. In contrast to the nonimprinted sample, the RP-MIPs/CAM with many specific imprinted cavities can match the shape, size, and functional groups of SA, promoting the specific molecular recognition ability and binding ability toward SA. Additionally, the RP-MIPs/CAM exhibited a favorable reusability of 13.62% loss of initial adsorption quantity after five reuse cycles. According to the results, the current study provides a green and sustainable way to fabricate a functional adsorption membrane based on the natural biomass that is expected to have potential application in the selective separation of cis-diols compounds, and it also provides a promising way for recovering biomass waste, green chemistry, and sustainable development.KEYWORDS: RP, biomass, boronate affinity, molecularly imprinted, SA adsorption