Selective extraction of endogenous peptides from human serum with magnetic mesoporous carbon composites

Abstract Highly sensitive and selective enrichment of endogenous peptides or proteins from complex bio-system takes a significant important place to the proteomic. In this work, a unique Fe 3 O 4 @2SiO 2 @mSiO 2 -C nanomaterial was synthesized, contributing to the separation and enrichment of low concentration peptides from complex mixture. The highly ordered mesoporous carbon structure render the nanospheres with unique properties of strongly connected pore channels, strong hydrophobic properties, high specific surface area (254.90 m 2 /g), uniform pore size (3.61 nm). Which made it a promising candidates for the efficient enrichment of peptides through hydrophobic-hydrophobic interaction with low detection limit (0.2 fmol), superb size-exclusion of high molecular weight proteins, highly selectivity for BSA digest (molar ratio of BSA tryptic digests/BSA, 1:400), ideal peptides recovery (about 87.5%), wonderful repeatability (RSD less than 25%). Moreover, the as-prepared Fe 3 O 4 @2SiO 2 @mSiO 2 -C nanoparticles were successfully enriched 2198 endogenous peptides from human serum, which fully indicated that the mesoporous carbon nanoparticles was a promising candidate for isolating proteins or peptides from complex biologicals.