GLYCANLIPO · Selective glycan recognition using molecularly imprinted liposomes

Selective glycan recognition using molecularly imprinted liposomes

Glycans, also referred to as carbohydrates, carry unique information in biological systems that make them an important source of biomarkers for wide range of diseases. While recognition of glycans with high affinity and exquisite specificity is at the heart of the early and accurate detection of such diseases, selective glycan recognition remains a daunting task due to their inherent diversity and complexity. In this framework, a key challenge is the design of a universal platform for highly specific recognition of a broad spectrum of glycan structures. Boronic acids (BAs), which react with diols, are the most commonly used recognition moieties for the synthesis of binders for glycans, which contain many hydroxyl groups. However, the challenge is to spatially arrange carbohydrate receptors, such as BAs, with the precision and stability required to differentiate a broad range of glycans. GLYCANLIPO addressed this challenge by using concepts and tools from lipid membrane biophysics and molecular imprinting to produce BA-functionalized liposomes with high affinity binding sites. The overall approach to create imprinted liposomes involves initial free rearrangement of polymerizable lipids functionalised with BAs to form binding sites towards template glycans followed by UV polymerisation of the lipid backbone of the liposome to fix the spatial arrangement of BAs. The Specific Research Objectives (SRO) of GLYCANLIPO were: 1) to produce, characterize and optimize polymerized liposomes functionalised with sugar receptors and, 2) to perform molecular imprinting of glycans on polymerized liposomes. Molecularly imprinted liposomes was successfully generated using the proposed idea and a 3 fold increase in the affinity was observed for a model oligosaccharide.Given that only one type of recognition moiety (i.e. BA) was used, the results indicate that the performance of imprinted liposomes can be enhanced and that the liposome surface imprinting strategy can be easily extended to more complex systems.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз