Moleculary imprinted micro- and nanoparticles for cancer associated glycan motifs

Sialic acids are an important family of monosaccharides that are typically found as terminal moieties of glycans. Aberrant sialylation has been proven to correlate with various diseases including cancer. Glycosylation analysis is complex due to high diversityof the glycan isomers and their low abundance. Antibodies and lectins are commonly used in glycan purification and enrichment. However, high cost, poor availability, and limitation in storage/testing conditions hinders their application on a broader scale. This thesis is focused on the development of alternative glycan specific receptors with their potential applications in glycomics and cell imaging. The underlying technique for producing the synthetic receptors is molecular imprinting. Highly complementary binding sites are formed by fixing pre-ordered template/functional monomer complexes into a highly crosslinked polymer matrix. Fundamental investigation of this intermolecular imprinting approach in the imprinting of glycosylated targets is reported here. The core of this study focuses on the elucidation of relative contribution of orthogonally interacting functional monomers, their structural tuning and the importance of monomer, solvent and counterion choice on the imprinting. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are developed as particles of different sizes for glycan/glycopeptide enrichment applications or combined with fluorescent reportergroups for use as glycan imaging nanolabels. Special attention is given to the improvement of sialic acid MIP selectivities toward particular structures associated with cancer biomarkers. Development of MIPs against such complex targets includes design of linkage selective MIPs with comprehensive studies of the affinities and selectivities of the final glycan specific materials.