Preparation of hydrophilic monolithic capillary column by in situ photo-polymerization of N-vinyl-2-pyrrolidinone and acrylamide for highly selective and sensitive enrichment of N-linked glycopeptides.

In this study, a novel kind of amide functionalized hydrophilic monolith was synthesized by the in situ photo-polymerization of N-vinyl-2-pyrrolidinone (NVP), acrylamide (AM), and N, N'-methylenebisacrylamide (MBA) in a UV transparent capillary, and successfully applied for hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC) based enrichment of N-linked glycopeptides. With 2 μg of the tryptic digests of IgG as the sample, after enrichment, 18 glycopeptides could be identified by MALDI-TOF/TOF MS analysis. Furthermore, with the mixture of BSA and IgG digests (10,000:1, m/m) as the sample, 6 N-linked glycopeptides were unambiguously identified after enrichment, indicating the high selectivity and good specificity of such material. Moreover, such a monolithic capillary column was also applied for the N-glycosylation sites profiling of 6 μg protein digests from HeLa cells and 1 μL human serum. In total, 530 and 262 unique N-glycosylated peptides were identified, respectively, corresponding to 282 and 124N-glycoproteins, demonstrating its great potential for the large scale glycoproteomics analysis.