Analytical Sciences

Determination of Glycoproteins by a Self-Assembled 4-Mercaptophenylboronic Acid Film on a Quartz Crystal Microbalance

Xiao-Tong MA,*1 Xi-Wen HE,*1 Wen-You LI,*1,*2,*3,*4 and Yu-Kui ZHANG*1,*5

*1 Research Center for Analytical Sciences, College of Chemistry, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China
*2 State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology, Tianjin 300071, China
*3 Tianjin Key Laboratory of Biosensing and Molecular Recognition, Tianjin 300071, China
*4 Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin), Tianjin 300071, China
*5 National Chromatographic Research and Analysis Center, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian 116023, China

Glycosylation plays an important part in many biological processes. However, many glycoproteins are either of low abundance or covered by other components in biological samples. Hence, developing new methods to measure the glycoproteins with both high efficiency and low detection limit is important. In this work, a self-assembled 4-mercaptophenylboronic acid film was coated on a quartz crystal microbalance chip. By optimizing the reaction time and the concentration of 4-mercaptophenylboronic acid, a sensor that specifically responded to glycoproteins was created. Then, several parameters for the prepared sensor were investigated and the working curve for representative glycoprotein–transferrin was established. The linearity range was from 50 to 400 ng/mL and the detection limit was 21.0 ng/mL. The sensor was used to detect transferrin in artificial urine samples. This sensor has a low detection limit of glycoproteins requiring only a small amount of samples, and thus has potential applications in both pharmaceutical and medical areas.

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