Selective analysis of interferon-alpha in human serum with boronate affinity oriented imprinting based plastic antibody

Abstract

Interferons are important biomolecules in human immune system. Cytokine interferon alpha (IFN-α), a type I interferon, is one of the major components of the innate immune response involved in autoimmune diseases. Thus, the analysis of interferons is of great importance for both biological and pharmaceutical purposes. In this work, an IFN-α specific plastic antibody is prepared via boronate affinity oriented surface imprinting. By combing with the magnetic nanoparticles, the imprinted material exhibits several advantages, including strong affinity (K_d: 75.2 nM), high specificity (cross reactivity<25%), excellent efficiency (imprinting efficiency: 44.1%), tolerance to interferences, and easy manipulation. By employing the prepared imprinted material as sorbent for selective enrichment of IFN-α, a good linearity is achieved in the range of 50 ng/mL-10 μg/mL, and the detection and quantifcation limits are 10 ng/mL and 50 ng/mL respectively. The recoveries of this approach are found within 75.8%-82.2% with relative standard deviations of 6.4-9.7%. Furthermore, the IFN-α in spiked human serum is analyzed with acceptable reliability (recovery: 77.3%, RSD: 7.9%). Because of these highly desirable properties, the IFN-α specific plastic antibody can find more applications in medical and pharmaceutical industry.

Keywords: Glycoprotein; Interferon-alpha; Molecular imprinting; Plastic antibody; Sample preparation.