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

In this study, to selectively enrich N-glycans from complex biological samples, a novel Zr(IV) mod-ified adenosine triphosphate (Zr(IV)-ATP) functionalized monolith was prepared through a facile ap-proach. 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 lad -der was used to optimize the enrichment conditions for APTS labeled N-glycans, and capillary elec-trophoresis (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 en-riched 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 pro-posed method was successfully used for the enrichment and detection of N-glycans released from Ribonuclease B. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study successfully achieved selective enrichment of N-glycans from biological samples using a Zr(IV)-ATP functionalized monolith. The optimization of enrichment conditions and evaluation of enrichment efficiency using capillary electrophoresis coupled with laser-induced fluorescence detector were effectively demonstrated in the research.