A combination of distillation-precipitation polymerization and click chemistry: fabrication of boronic acid functionalized Fe sub(3)O sub(4) hybrid composites for enrichment of glycoproteins

• Published in: Journal of materials chemistry. B, Materials for biology and medicine Vol. 2; no. 21; pp. 3254 - 3262
• Main Authors: Zhang, Xihao, He, Xiwen, Chen, Langxing, Zhang, Yukui
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.05.2014
• Subjects: Alkynes; Biomedical materials; Distillation; Enrichment; Glycoprotein; Ligands; Polymerization; Selectivity
• ISSN: 2050-750X; 2050-7518
• DOI: 10.1039/c4tb00379a

Biomedical sciences, and in particular biomarker research, demand efficient glycoprotein enrichment platforms. In this paper, a facile and efficient approach combining distillation-precipitation polymerization (DPP) and click chemistry was developed to synthesize boronic acid ligand-modified magnetic nanoparticles for the enrichment of glycoproteins. Due to the relatively large amount of benzyl chloride groups introduced by DPP on the magnetic core, which easily can be transferred into azide groups, the alkyne-phenylboronic acid ligands were immobilized onto the surface of Fe sub(3)O sub(4) with high efficiency viathe Cu(i)-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC) 'click' reaction. The morphology, structure and composition of the resulting core-shell Fe sub(3)O sub(4)oly(4-vinylben ylchloride)midophenylboronic acid (Fe sub(3)O sub(4)VBCPBA) nanocomposites were characterized by transmission electron microscopy, X-ray powder diffraction, vibrating sample magnetometry, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis and X-ray photoelectron spectrometry. The Fe sub(3)O sub(4)VBCPBA microspheres held a similar to 50 nm polymeric shell, and exhibited high magnetic response to an external magnetic field. The binding results demonstrated that Fe sub(3)O sub(4)VBCPBA possessed high adsorption capacity and remarkable selectivity to glycoproteins. Moreover, the glycoproteins in the egg white sample could be enriched under physiological conditions (pH 7.4) as well, due to the lower pK sub(a) value of the alkyne-phenylboronic acid ligand. The high stability and selectivity of Fe sub(3)O sub(4)VBCPBA for the glycoproteins were retained over several separation cycles. This boronate affinity material has potential applications in biomedical and biotechnological fields including drug delivery and biosensing.