The design and synthesis of materials possessing specific binding and catalytic behaviour have remained a long-standing attraction for both the understanding of enzymic action and their technical applications. Notable among a variety of approaches being adapted are the synthesis of macropolycyclic (cryptand) receptors I), enzyme analogues based on carbohydrates*), enzyme-analogue built polymers3), and various chiral’) or catalytic6-8, groups attached to a large number of polymer types.

Here we wish to report a simple template strategy for the synthesis of substrate specific polymers which is based on complementary interactions. We term this strategy “host-guest polymerization” as compared with the more conventional template polymerization9), and suggest that it can also be employed to prepare tailormade polymers useful in a number of areas in solid phase chemistry as will be mentioned later. According to this strategy, as illustrated in Scheme 1, a monomer mixture containing a large proportion of cross-linking units is polymerized in the presence of a free substrate which is to act as the template during the polymer formation process. This is simply a mixing procedure, and no chemical attachment to the monomeric units is required. The monomers are, however, chosen in such a way as to have non-covalent binding abilities (ie, ionic, hydrogen bond, hydrophobic, charge transfer, etc.) complementary to those of the guest template. Due to the complementarity of the binding sites between the polymerizing units and the template, a host-guest relationship is materialized during the polymer formation process and an imprint of the guest (template) molecules is developed within the polymer matrix. Removal of the template at the end of the polymerization is affected by a simple washing procedure, while the cross-linking units preserve the individual binding centers in their relative loci so as to form a tri-dimensional complement of the template.