Development of zirconium modified adenosine triphosphate functionalized monolith for specific enrichment of N-glycans

Abstract

In this study, to selectively enrich N-glycans from complex biological samples, a novel Zr(IV) modified adenosine triphosphate (Zr(IV)-ATP) functionalized monolith was prepared through a facile approach. Well-defined macroporous structure was observed in the ATP functionalized monolith, which allows rapid mass transfer under low backpressure and is beneficial for the enrichment of N-glycans. After being modified with Zr(IV), the resulting Zr(IV)-ATP functionalized monolith could selectively capture N-glycans through the specific interactions between the sulfonate groups of 1-aminopyrene-3,6,8-trisulfonic acid (APTS) labeled N-glycans and Zr(IV). An APTS labeled maltooligosaccharide ladder was used to optimize the enrichment conditions for APTS labeled N-glycans, and capillary electrophoresis (CE) coupled with laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) detector was employed to evaluate the enrichment efficiency. The results show that the APTS labeled maltooligosaccharides could be enriched under the selected conditions and the signal amplify factors of the maltooligosaccharides were between 7.4 and 19.5 with RSDs for reproducibility from 4.0% to 8.3% (n = 3). Finally, the proposed method was successfully used for the enrichment and detection of N-glycans released from Ribonuclease B.