Antibody-Free Hydrogel with the Synergistic Effect of Cell Imprinting and Boronate Affinity: Toward the Selective Capture and Release of Undamaged Circulating Tumor Cells.

The selective and highly efficient capture of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from blood and their subsequent release without damage are very important for the early diagnosis of tumors and for understanding the mechanism of metastasis. Herein, a universal strategy is proposed for the fabrication of an antibody-free hydrogel that has a synergistic effect by featuring microinterfaces obtained by cell imprinting and molecular recognition conferred by boronate affinity. With this artificial antibody, highly efficient capture of human hepatocarcinoma SMMC-7721 cells is achieved: as many as 90.3 ± 1.4% (n = 3) cells are captured when 1 × 105 SMMC-7721 cells are incubated on a 4.5 cm2 hydrogel, and 99% of these captured cells are subsequently released without any loss of proliferation ability. In the presence of 1000 times as many nontarget cells, namely, leukaemia Jurkat cells, the SMMC-7721 cells can be captured with an enrichment factor as high as 13.5 ± 3.2 (n = 3), demonstrating the superior selectivity of the artificial antibody for the capture of the targeted CTCs. Most importantly, the SMMC-7721 cells can be successfully captured even when spiked into whole blood, indicating the great promise of this approach for the further molecular characterization of CTCs.

Epitope Imprinting Technology: Progress, Applications, and Perspectives toward Artificial Antibodies.

Epitope imprinting is a promising tool to generate antibody-like specific recognition sites. Recently, because of the ease of obtaining templates, the flexibility in selecting monomers, their resistance to harsh environments, and the high specificity toward targets, epitope-imprinted materials have attracted much attention in various fields, such as bioanalysis, clinical therapy, and pharmacy. Here, the discussion is focused on the current representative epitope imprinting technologies, including epitope bulk imprinting and epitope surface imprinting. Moreover, the application of epitope-imprinted materials to the recognition of peptides, proteins, and cells is reviewed. Finally, the remaining challenges arising from the intrinsic properties of epitope imprinting are discussed, and future development in the field is prospected.

3-Carboxybenzoboroxole Functionalized Polyethylenimine Modified Magnetic Graphene Oxide Nanocomposites for Human Plasma Glycoproteins Enrichment under Physiological Conditions.

Boronate affinity materials have been successfully used for the selective recognition of glycoproteins. However, by such materials, the large-scale glycoproteins enrichment from human plasma under physiological conditions is rarely reported. In this work, 3-carboxybenzoboroxole (CBX) functionalized polyethylenimine (PEI) modified magnetic graphene oxide nanocomposites were synthesized. Benefitting from the low pKa value of CBX (∼6.9) and PEI dendrimer-assisted multivalent binding, the Freundlich constant (KF) for the adsorption of horseradish peroxidase (HRP) was 3.0-7.3 times higher than that obtained by previous work, displaying the high enrichment capacity. Moreover, PEI could improve the hydrophilicity of nanocomposites and reduce nonglycoprotein adsorption. Therefore, such nanocomposites were successfully applied to the analysis of human plasma glycoproteome under physiological conditions, and the identified glycoproteins number and recognition selectivity was increased when compared to the results obtained by previous boronic acid-functionalized particles (Sil@Poly(APBA-co-MBAAm)) under common alkaline condition (137 vs 78 and 67.8% vs 57.8%, respectively). In addition, thrombin (F2), an important plasma glycoprotein, labile under alkaline conditions, was specifically identified by our method, demonstrating the great promise of such nanocomposites in the deep-coverage glycoproteome analysis.

Surface sieving coordinated IMAC material for purification of His-tagged proteins.

Tailor-made materials for the purification of proteins with His-tag was designed through synergizing the selectivity of surface sieving and metal ion affinity. By excluding impurity proteins out of the surface polymer network, such materials could purify His-tagged proteins from the crude cell lysis with purity up to 90%, improved by 14% compared to that obtained by the commercial metal chelating affinity materials. This study might promote the His-tagged protein purification to a new level.

Enzymatic Reactor with Trypsin Immobilized on Graphene Oxide Modified Polymer Microspheres To Achieve Automated Proteome Quantification.

Protein digestion and isotope labeling are two critical steps in proteome quantification. However, the conventional in-solution protocol unavoidably suffers from disadvantages such as time-consuming, low labeling efficiency, and tedious off-line manual operation, which might affect the quantification accuracy, reproducibility, and throughput. To address these problems, we developed a fully automated proteome quantification platform, in which an ultraperformance immobilized microreactor (upIMER) with graphene-oxide-modified polymer microspheres as the matrix was developed, to achieve not only the simultaneous protein digestion and 18O labeling, but also the online integration with nano-high-pressure liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometry (nanoHPLC-ESI-MS/MS). Compared to the conventional off-line protocols, such a platform exhibits obviously improved digestion and 18O labeling efficiency (only 8% peptides with missed cleavage sites, 99% labeling efficiency, and 2.5 min reaction time), leading to the increased quantification coverage, accuracy, precision and throughput. All the results demonstrated that our developed fully automated platform should provide new opportunities to improve the accuracy, reproducibility, and throughput for proteome quantification.

Proteomic study provides new clues for complications of hemodialysis caused by dialysis membrane.

The complications of hemodialysis accompanied the hemodialysis and threaten the patients' life. Besides the loss of nutrient substance, such as amino acid and vitamin, we found new clues that the adsorbed proteins on common-used polysulfone-based dialysis membrane might be the reason according to the qualitative proteomic study by ionic liquid assisted sample preparation method. Our results indicated that the adsorbed proteins on the membrane were related with complement activation, blood coagulation, and leukocyte-related biological process. The quantitative proteome further demonstrated some significant changes of signal proteins in the post-dialysis plasma after the hemodialysis, such as beta-2-microglobulin and platelet factor-4, which would further verify these new clues.

Synthesis of Zwitterionic Polymer Particles via Combined Distillation Precipitation Polymerization and Click Chemistry for Highly Efficient Enrichment of Glycopeptide.

Because of the low abundance of glycopeptide in natural biological samples, methods for efficient and selective enrichment of glycopeptides play a significant role in mass spectrometry (MS)-based glycoproteomics. In this study, a novel kind of zwitterionic hydrophilic interaction chromatography polymer particles, namely, poly(N,N-methylenebisacrylamide-co-methacrylic acid)@l-Cys (poly(MBAAm-co-MAA)@l-Cys), for the enrichment of glycopeptides was synthesized by a facile and efficient approach that combined distillation precipitation polymerization (DPP) and "thiol-ene" click reaction. In the DPP approach, residual vinyl groups explored outside the core with high density, then the functional ligand cysteine was immobilized onto the surface of core particles by highly efficient thiol-ene click reaction. Taking advantage of the unique structure of poly(MBAAm-co-MAA)@l-Cys, the resulting particles possess remarkable enrichment selectivity for glycopeptides from the tryptic digested human immunoglobulin G. The polymer particles were successfully employed for the analysis of human plasma, and 208 unique glycopeptides corresponding to 121 glycoproteins were reliably identified in triple independent nano-LC-MS/MS runs. The selectivity toward glycopeptides of these particles poly(MBAAm-co-MAA)@l-Cys is ∼2 times than that of the commercial beads. These results demonstrated that these particles had great potential for large-scale glycoproteomics research. Moreover, the strategy with the combination of DPP and thiol-ene click chemistry might be a facile method to produce functional polymer particles for bioenrichment application.

Hydrogen-bond interaction assisted branched copolymer HILIC material for separation and N-glycopeptides enrichment.

Hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC) has attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its efficient application in the separation of polar compounds and the enrichment of glycopeptides. However, HILIC materials are still of weak hydrophilicity and thereby present weak retention and selectivity. In this work, branched copolymer modified hydrophilic material Sil@Poly(THMA-co-MBAAm), with high hydrophilicity and unique "claw-like" polyhydric groups, were prepared by "grafting from" thiol-ene click reaction. Due to the abundant functional groups provided by branched copolymer, the material showed excellent retention for nucleosides, necleobases, acidic compounds, sugars and peptides. Furthermore, Sil@Poly(THMA-co-MBAAm) was also applied for the N-glycosylation sites profiling towards the digests of the mouse brain, and 1997N-glycosylated peptides were identified, corresponding to 686 glycoprotein groups. Due to the assisted hydrogen-bond interaction, the selectivity for glycopeptide enrichment in the real sample reached 94.6%, which was the highest as far as we know. All these results indicated that such hydrogen-bond interaction assisted branched copolymer HILIC material possessed great potential for the separation and large scale glycoproteomics analysis.

Multiepitope Templates Imprinted Particles for the Simultaneous Capture of Various Target Proteins.

To achieve the simultaneous capture of various target proteins, the multiepitope templates imprinted particles were developed by phase inversion-based poly(ether sulfone) (PES) self-assembly. Herein, with the top three high-abundance proteins in the human plasma, serum albumin, immunoglobulin G, and transferrin, as the target proteins, their N-terminal peptides were synthesized as the epitope templates. After the preorganization of three epitopes and PES in dimethylacetamide, the multiepitope templates imprinted particles were formed in water through self-assembly, by which the simultaneous recognition of three target proteins in human plasma was achieved with high selectivity. Furthermore, the binding kinetics study proved that the adsorption mechanism in this imprinting system toward three epitope templates was the same as that on the single-epitope imprinting polymer. These results demonstrate that our proposed multiepitope templates imprinting strategy might open a new era of artificial antibodies to achieve the recognition of various targets simultaneously.

Boronic Acid-Functionalized Particles with Flexible Three-Dimensional Polymer Branch for Highly Specific Recognition of Glycoproteins.

A novel organic-inorganic hybrid particle with high hydrophilicity three-dimensional boronic acid functional polymer branches was facilely synthesized through thiol-ene surface-initiated click reaction, by which the target glycoprotein could be captured selectively in the 5000-fold disrupting protein. This highest selectivity ever reported demonstrated that this boronic acid functionalized particle exhibited great potential in the recognition of cis-diol-containing biomolecules, including the glycoproteins.

Thermoresponsive Epitope Surface-Imprinted Nanoparticles for Specific Capture and Release of Target Protein from Human Plasma.

Among various artificial antibodies, epitope imprinted polymer has been paid increasingly attention. To modulate the "adsorption and release" behavior by environment stimuli, N-isopropylacrylamide, was adopted to fabricate the thermoresponsive epitope imprinted sites. The prepared imprinted materials could adsorb 46.6 mg/g of target protein with the imprinting factor of 4.0. The template utilization efficiency could reach as high as 8.21%. More importantly, in the real sample, the materials could controllably capture the target protein from the human plasma at 45 °C and release it at 4 °C, which demonstrated the "on-demand" application potentials of such materials in the biomolecule recognition field.

Epitope imprinting enhanced IMAC (EI-IMAC) for highly selective purification of His-tagged protein.

Recombinant protein technology occupies an important position in fields including biopharmaceutics, proteomics, structural and functional biology. However, the purification of His-tagged protein, the majority portion of recombinant protein, is seriously hindered by impurities. These impurities, including host proteins with inherent cysteine and histidine-rich regions or metal centers, are usually beyond the purification ability of commonly used IMAC materials. To remove this barrier, a novel purification material was developed through enhancing the selectivity of IMAC by means of surface epitope imprinting using His-tag, the common terminal of His-tagged protein, as the template. Characterizations including TEM, thermogravimetric analysis, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, measurement of DLS size and zeta potential were carried out to prove the fabrication of the imprinted shell. Results exhibited a high imprinting factor of 7.1. Besides, the adsorption kinetics were not affected by the surface imprinted shell and could reach adsorption equilibrium within 15 min. Compared with the substrate IMAC, the novel epitope imprinting enhanced IMAC (EI-IMAC) showed an obvious improvement (5% increase of purity) in the selectivity of His-tagged recombinant protein from crude cell lysis.

Correction: Epitope imprinting enhanced IMAC (EI-IMAC) for highly selective purification of His-tagged protein.

Correction for 'Epitope imprinting enhanced IMAC (EI-IMAC) for highly selective purification of His-tagged protein' by Senwu Li et al., J. Mater. Chem. B, 2016, 4, 1960-1967.

Surface-imprinted nanoparticles prepared with a His-tag-anchored epitope as the template.

The specific recognition of biomolecules by artificial antibodies has inspired fascination among chemists and biologists. Herein, we propose a new method to prepare epitope-oriented surface-imprinted nanoparticles with high template utilization efficiency. Using a His-tag as the anchor to facilitate the epitope immobilization/removal and the self-polymerization of dopamine to control the imprinted shell thickness, the prepared epitope-imprinted nanoparticles show specific recognition of the target protein. Moreover, with improved hydrophilicity of the His-tag-anchored epitope, this method opens up a universal route for imprinting epitopes with various polarities.

An efficient approach to prepare boronate core-shell polymer nanoparticles for glycoprotein recognition via combined distillation precipitation polymerization and RAFT media precipitation polymerization.

Stimuli-responsive core-shell nanoparticles, with 3-acrylamidophenyl boronic acid (APBA) as the functional group, were synthesized via combined distillation precipitation polymerization and RAFT media precipitation polymerization. The well-defined boronic acid-polymer branch on the nanoparticle surface displayed high binding capacity and good selectivity towards cis-diol-containing molecules.

Epitope imprinted polyethersulfone beads by self-assembly for target protein capture from the plasma proteome.

Polymer self-assembly was developed as an epitope imprinting strategy involving facile processes and high recognition site density. As a model, transferrin epitope imprinted polyethersulfone (PES) beads were successfully fabricated using this technique. The imprinted beads demonstrated excellent selectivity toward the transferrin epitope and transferrin even in the real sample.

[Preparation of epitope imprinted particles for transferrin recognition by reversible addition fragmentation chain transfer strategy].

A kind of novel epitope surface imprinted particles was prepared by the reversible addition fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) strategy. The epitope of transferrin, N-terminal peptide of the protein with nine amino acid residues, was chosen as the template and immobi- lized with covalent interaction on the surface of silica particles through the truss arm glutaraldehyde. The living/controlled polymerization was initialed by 2,2'-azobisisobutyronitrile (AIBN) at 70 °C in the solution of N,N-dimethylformamide, with the regulation by triothioester agent 2-(dodecylthiocarbonothioylthio)-2-methylpropanoic acid. Methacrylic acid and 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate were chosen as the functional monomers and N, N-methylenebisacrylamide was chosen as the cross-linker in this polymerization. For this material, the binding capacity of the nine residue peptide could reach 2.36 mg/g with the imprinting factor (IF) of 1.89, while that for transferrin could reach 4.98 mg/g with IF of 1.61. The equilibrium could be achieved in 120 min for the transferrin recognition. In multi-protein competitive recognition, the imprinted factor of transferrin was the highest in the mixture of transferrin and other competitive proteins, such as cytochrome C and ß-lactoglobulin. The results indicated that these epitope surface imprinted particles with RAFT strategy could recognize not only the nine residue peptide but also the transferrin with good selectivity, high binding capacity and fast mass transfer.