Pickering HIPE-Templated Hyperbranched Molecularly Imprinted Sorbents with Hierarchical Porous Channels for Highly Specific Separation of Flavonoids

Abstract The rapid development of agricultural production has led to significant environmental pollution from agricultural waste, particularly wastewater containing high-value flavonoids like naringin (NRG). Traditional extraction methods for NRG suffer from high energy consumption, low selectivity, and environmental concerns. To address these challenges, this study develops a high-capacity boronate affinity imprinted macroporous polymer (HPs@MCNCs-PEI@Y–Br-MIPs) using a W/O Pickering high internal phase emulsion templating method. The resulting material exhibited exceptional adsorption capacity (61.02 μmol g–1), fast mass transfer (equilibrium in 120 min), and high selectivity (Imprinting factor = 3.62) for NRG. The adsorbent demonstrated excellent regeneration stability (92.95% capacity retention after 7 cycles) and successfully purified NRG from crude NRG, improving purity from 60% to 90.68%. This study provides a novel approach for the production of hyperbranched adsorbents with abundant and uniformly distributed binding sites, which enables the selective extraction of high-value flavonoids from agricultural waste.