Functional dual hydrophilic dendrimer-modified metal-organic framework for the selective enrichment of N-glycopeptides

Analysis of protein glycosylation remains a significant challenge due to the low abundance of glycoproteins or N-glycopeptides. Here we have synthesized an amino-functionalized metal-organic framework (MOF) MIL-101(Cr)-NH2 whose surface is grafted with a hydrophilic dendrimer poly(amidoamine) (PAMAM) for N-glycopeptide enrichment based on the hydrophilic interactions. The selected substrate MOF MIL-101(Cr) owns high surface area which provides nice support for peptide adsorption. In addition, the MOF displayed a good hydrophilic property after being modified with amino groups. Most importantly, the grafted hydrophilic dendrimer PAMAM was firstly applied in the postsynthetic modification of MOFs. And this functionalization route using macromolecular dendrimer opens a new perspective in MOFs design. Owing to its long dendritic chains and abundant amino groups, our material displayed dual hydrophilic property. In the enrichment of standard glycoprotein HRP digestion, the functional MOF material was shown to have low detection limit (1 fmol/mu L) and good selectivity when the concentration of nonglycopeptides was 100 fold higher than the target N-glycopeptides. All the results proved that MIL-101(Cr)-NH2@ PAMAM has great potential in the glycoproteome analysis.