Organic-inorganic hybrid silica as supporting matrices for selective recognition of bovine hemoglobin via covalent immobilization

The synthesis of poly-aminophenylboronic acid (APBA) imprinted hybrid silica-based polymers for selective recognition of bovine hemoglobin (BHb) was described, where the mesoporous hybrid silica supporting matrices were prepared by a mild sol-gel process with tetraethoxysilane and 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane as two precursors. Covalent immobilization of BHb was adopted in order to create homogeneous recognition sites. After removal of the template, the resulting imprinted polymers showed high binding affinity toward BHb and the imprinting factor (alpha) reached 2.12. The specificity of the BHb recognition was evaluated with competitive experiments, indicating the imprinted polymers have a higher selectivity for the template BHb. The easy preparation protocol and good protein recognition proper-ties made the approach an attractive solution to depletion of high-abundance protein from bovine blood.