Efficient enrichment glycoproteins/glycopeptides
from complex biological
solutions are very important in the biomedical sciences, in particular
biomarker research. In this work, the high hydrophilic polyethylenimine
conjugated polymaltose polymer brushes functionalized magnetic Fe3O4 nanoparticles (NPs) denoted as Fe3O4–PEI–pMaltose were designed and synthesized
via a simple two-step modification. The obtained superhydrophilic
Fe3O4–PEI–pMaltose NPs displayed
outstanding advantages in the enrichment of N-linked glycopeptides,
including high selectivity (1:100, mass ratios of HRP and bovine serum
albumin (BSA) digest), low detection limit (10 fmol), large binding
capacity (200 mg/g), and high enrichment recovery (above 85%). The
above-mentioned excellent performance of novel Fe3O4–PEI–pMaltose NPs was attributed to graft of
maltose polymer brushes and efficient assembly strategy. Moreover,
Fe3O4–PEI–pMaltose NPs were further
utilized to selectively enrich glycopeptides from human renal mesangial
cell (HRMC, 200 μg) tryptic digest, and 449 N-linked glycopeptides,
representing 323 different glycoproteins and 476 glycosylation sites,
were identified. It was expected that the as-synthesized Fe3O4–PEI–pMaltose NPs, possessing excellent
performance (high binding capacity, good selectivity, low detection
limit, high enrichment recovery, and easy magnetic separation) coupled
to a facile preparation procedure, have a huge potential in N-glycosylation
proteome analysis of complex biological samples.