Thiolactone-based conjugation assisted magnetic imprinted microspheres for specific capturing target proteins

Abstract Protein imprinted materials receive considerable attention in biological scope but restricted about practical utilization for the lack of adsorption efficiency and rebinding specificity. To approach the dearth, imprinted polymers or ligands capable of designable structure, herein, the facile thiolactone-based conjugates accompanied by multiple functional units, were put forward into imprinting system as protein anchors by click chemistry. Due to the simple implementation and flexible reconstitution of this conjugation strategy, a series of thiol-ene-amine segments were fabricated to capture bovine serum albumin (BSA) for generating imprinting cavities through dopamine self-polymerization on well-defined hollow magnetic substrates. Among them, the BSA-imprinted microspheres based on thiol-ene-MA conjugates (MA referred as 3-morpholinopropylamine) not only exhibited remarkable rebinding ability (adsorption capacity: 209.22 mg/g, imprinting factor: 4.59) and efficient saturation adsorption (30 min), but also presented satisfactory selectivity in the individual and competitive protein samples. Assisted with thiol-ene-amine conjugation, the elaborate magnetic imprinted materials for specific separating target macromolecules hold great promising in applications.