Hydrogen-bond interaction assisted branched copolymer HILIC material for separation and N-glycopeptides enrichment

Hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC) has attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its efficient application in the separation of polar compounds and the enrichment of glycopeptides. However, HILIC materials are still of weak hydrophilicity and thereby present weak retention and selectivity. In this work, branched copolymer modified hydrophilic material Sil@Poly(THMA-co-MBAAm), with high hydrophilicity and unique "claw-like" polyhydric groups, were prepared by "grafting from" thiol-ene click reaction. Due to the abundant functional groups provided by branched copolymer, the material showed excellent retention for nucleosides, necleobases, acidic compounds, sugars and peptides. Furthermore, Sil@Poly(THMA-co-MBAAm) was also applied for the N-glycosylation sites profiling towards the digests of the mouse brain, and 1997N-glycosylated peptides were identified, corresponding to 686 glycoprotein groups. Due to the assisted hydrogen-bond interaction, the selectivity for glycopeptide enrichment in the real sample reached 94.6%, which was the highest as far as we know. All these results indicated that such hydrogen-bond interaction assisted branched copolymer HILIC material possessed great potential for the separation and large scale glycoproteomics analysis.