Development and Characterization of Magnetic SARS-CoV-2 Peptide-Imprinted Polymers.

Beatriz Fresco-Cala,Tamara Rudolf,Benedikt Keitel,Jan Münch,Boris Mizaikoff,Alex D Batista,Rüdiger Groß,Soumya Rajpal

doi:10.3390/nano11112985

Abstract

The development of new methods for the rapid, sensitive, and selective detection of SARS-CoV-2 is a key factor in overcoming the global pandemic that we have been facing for over a year. In this work, we focused on the preparation of magnetic molecularly imprinted polymers (MMIPs) based on the self-polymerization of dopamine at the surface of magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs). Instead of using the whole SARS-CoV-2 virion as a template, a peptide of the viral spike protein, which is present at the viral surface, was innovatively used for the imprinting step. Thus, problems associated with the infectious nature of the virus along with its potential instability when used as a template and under the polymerization conditions were avoided. Dopamine was selected as a functional monomer following a rational computational screening approach that revealed not only a high binding energy of the dopamine–peptide complex but also multi-point interactions across the entire peptide template surface as opposed to other monomers with similar binding affinity. Moreover, variables affecting the imprinting efficiency including polymerization time and amount of peptide and dopamine were experimentally evaluated. Finally, the selectivity of the prepared MMIPs vs. other peptide sequences (i.e., from Zika virus) was evaluated, demonstrating that the developed MMIPs were only specific for the target SARS-CoV-2 peptide.

Highlights

Introduction published maps and institutional affilThe ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has affected a large percentage of the world’s population, including collapsing hospitals and medical services in almost every country [1,2].Patients infected with COVID-19 can be asymptomatic or present mild symptoms such as coughing or fever and medical complications such as pneumonia and kidney injury [3,4,5].the ease of transmission of this virus has made its containment difficult, forcing the governments to limit social life [6]
Using UCSF Chimera, we analyzed the docked poses of the three monomers distributed across the energy range from −3.2 to −3.4 kcal/mol, and only dopamine was found to be uniformly bound over the entire SARS-CoV-2 peptide surface (Figure 1C)
molecularly imprinted polymers (MMIPs) based on the self-polymerization of a dopamine layer coated on the surface of magnetic nanoparticles were prepared in the presence of a SARS-CoV-2 spike-derived peptide as the template

Summary

Introduction

Introduction published maps and institutional affilThe ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has affected a large percentage of the world’s population, including collapsing hospitals and medical services in almost every country [1,2].Patients infected with COVID-19 can be asymptomatic or present mild symptoms such as coughing or fever and medical complications such as pneumonia and kidney injury [3,4,5].the ease of transmission of this virus has made its containment difficult, forcing the governments to limit social life [6]. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has affected a large percentage of the world’s population, including collapsing hospitals and medical services in almost every country [1,2]. Patients infected with COVID-19 can be asymptomatic or present mild symptoms such as coughing or fever and medical complications such as pneumonia and kidney injury [3,4,5]. The ease of transmission of this virus has made its containment difficult, forcing the governments to limit social life [6]. One of the key ways to control infections is the conducting of tests that rapidly determine whether a patient is infected with SARSCoV-2. Efforts have been geared towards the development of fast and cheap methodologies that allow for the detection of this coronavirus with high sensitivity and selectivity [7,8,9,10,11].

Methods

Results

Conclusion