Chondroitin sulfate-enriched hierarchical multichannel polydopamine nanoparticles with ultrahigh sorption capacity for separation of low-density lipoprotein.

A hierarchical multichannel polydopamine (HMPDA) nanoparticle with ample chondroitin sulfate (CS) is fabricated via modification of the silane coupling agent (APTES), followed by grafting CS on the unique bicontinuous open channels of HMPDA through amidation reaction. The obtained nanoparticles with both mesopores and macropores, abbreviated as HMPDA-A-CS15, possess a total pore volume of 0.3398 cm3 g-1, and a large surface area up to 69.10 m2 g-1. The as-prepared HMPDA-A-CS15 exhibits significantly enhanced selectivity for the separation of LDL, which is attributed to the specific recognition effect of CS for LDL. Furthermore, the unique large open channels endow the HMPDA-A-CS15 nanoparticles with a gratifying sorption capacity (1015.2 mg g-1) for LDL adsorption. The captured LDL can be stripped using 0.5% (v/v) ammonia solution with the advantage of easy atomization in downstream mass spectrometry (MS) analyses, and a recovery of 71.7% is achieved. Moreover, HMPDA-A-CS15 is further employed in the enrichment of LDL, which can be separated from the complex serum of simulated hypercholesterolemia patients with a favorable adsorption performance, as illustrated by the SDS-PAGE technique.