Atom transfer radical polymerization of diverse functional SBA-15 for selective separation of proteins

•Strong anion, cation and zwitterion modified SBA-15 were synthesized via ATRP.•Some of functionalized materials can selective adsorption certain proteins.•The sequential removal of the target proteins was achieved by the proposed method.

Poor detection of low-abundant proteins is a common problem in most current protein identification schemes. This is attributed partially to the existence of high-abundant protein. Therefore, selective removal of specific proteins prior to analysis is in great demand. In response these needs, we previously described two kinds of ion exchange groups functionalized SBA-15 synthesized by direct silylanization reaction. Herein, we designed and synthesized strong anion, cation and zwitterion functionalized SBA-15 via atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP). The previous and current materials were characterized and theirs adsorption abilities for some model proteins (bovine serum albumin (BSA), hemoglobin (Hb), myoglobin (Mb) and lysozyme (Lys)) were evaluated. The results demonstrated that different functionalized SBA-15 is capable to selective removal of certain proteins in protein mixture. It also indicated that this sample preparation technique could be potentially applied to reduce the complexity on protein identification for biological samples with a wide dynamic range.

Graphical abstractFigure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload as PowerPoint slide