Preparation of mesoporous silica embedded pipette tips for rapid enrichment of endogenous peptides

Mesoporous silica embedded pipette tips (mSiO2-Tips) were successfully prepared by a simple method and applied to rapid enrichment of endogenous peptides for the first time. The prepared mSiO2-Tips showed low back pressure when solvent was pipetted up and down. As a result, mSiO2-Tip could selectively trap peptides and exclude high-MW proteins simultaneously based on size-exclusion mechanism due to the uniform mesopore structure of the sorbent bed. The in-pipette-tip SPE approach was proved to be easy-operation, sensitive and fast (less than 2 min) for the analysis of peptides, which was further successfully applied in the efficient enrichment of peptides from human plasma.