Daojin Li

Boronate affinity materials, as unique sorbents, have emerged as important media for the selective separation and molecular recognition of cis-diol-containing compounds. With the introduction of boronic acid functionality, boronate affinity materials exhibit several significant advantages, including broad-spectrum selectivity, reversible covalent binding, pH-controlled capture/release, fast association/desorption kinetics, and good compatibility with mass spectrometry. Because cis-diol-containing biomolecules, including nucleosides, saccharides, glycans, glycoproteins and so on, are the important targets in current research frontiers such as metabolomics, glycomics and proteomics, boronate affinity materials have gained rapid development and found increasing applications in the last decade. In this review, we critically survey recent advances in boronate affinity materials. We focus on fundamental considerations as well as important progress and new boronate affinity materials reported in the last decade. We particularly discuss on the effects of the structure of boronate ligands and supporting materials on the properties of boronate affinity materials, such as binding pH, affinity, selectivity, binding capacity, tolerance for interference and so on. A variety of promising applications, including affinity separation, proteomics, metabolomics, disease diagnostics and aptamer selection, are introduced with main emphasis on how boronate affinity materials can solve the issues in the applications and what merits boronate affinity materials can provide.

Protein phosphorylation is a major post-translational modification and represents a ubiquitous mechanism for the cellular signaling of many different biological processes. Selective enrichment of phosphopeptides from the complex biological samples is a key step for the mass spectrometric (MS) analysis of protein phosphorylation. Herein, we present phosphate-imprinted mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) as an ideal sorbent for selective enrichment of phosphopeptides and an off-line combination with matrix-asisted laser desorption ionization-time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) for highly efficient analysis of protein phosphorylation. The phosphate-imprinted MSNs were prepared according to a newly reported strategy called dual-template docking oriented molecular imprinting (DTD-OMI). The prepared molecularly imprinted mesoporous material exhibited several significant merits, such as excellent selectivity toward phosphopeptides, tolerance to interference, fast binding equilibrium, and large binding capacity, which made the molecularly imprinted mesoporous material an ideal sorbent for selective enrichment of phosphopeptides. Using β-casein as a representative phosphoprotein, highly efficient phosphorylation analysis by the off-line platform was verified. Phosphorylation analysis of a nonfat milk sample was also well demonstrated. Because of their highly desirable properties, the phosphate-imprinted MSNs could find more applications in the analysis of protein phosphorylation.