Abstract: A novel gold doped inverse opal photonic crystal (IO PC) was successfully fabricated with combination of molecularly imprinted technical for the fast determination of parathion. Firstly, a closest silica array arrangement behaved as the 3D photonic crystal precursors to build the opal photonic crystal (O PC). Secondly, the parathion-containing polymeric solution with gold nanoparticles was drawn into the 3D array cracks. After polymerization, the well-designed O PC was treated with HF solution for the etching of silica skeleton. Finally, the template parathion was removed and the Au-MIP IO PCs were obtained. The morphology of SiO2 and Au NPs were characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and the eluted influence of the IO PCs were monitoring by the scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The crosslinking effect was well optimized for the best spectrum detection of parathion. The as-synthesized Au-MIP IO PCs displayed the specificity towards parathion and competitive experiments showed the selectivity. The responsive time was only 5 minutes and the parathion could be well detected from real water samples and the recoveries were between 95.5% and 101.5%