Chemistry Seminar Series: Zhen Liu

Zhen Liu
Professor
State Key Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry for Life Science
School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
Nanjing University, China

Thursday, July 25, 2019
10:00 a.m.
C2-361 (Reading Room)

Abstract: 

Antibodies have been the working horse for the recognition of biomolecules for many important applications such as disease diagnostics and cancer therapy. However, antibodies suffer from some apparent disadvantages, such as poor stability and poor reproducibility. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) have developed as important alternatives of antibodies and found wide applications such as separation, sensing and bioassays. However, the preparation of MIPs capable of recognizing specific targets in complex biological samples or systems still remains greatly challenging. In recent years, we have gained great progresses in the area of molecular imprinting. With the invention of two facile and generally applicable imprinting approaches, i.e., photolithographic boronate affinity imprinting [1] and boronate affinity controllable oriented surface imprinting [2,3], we have prepared boronate affinity MIPs with excellent recognition properties towards cis-diol-containing compounds particularly glycoproteins and sugars. These MIPs enabled promising applications such as disease diagnosis [4], single cell analysis [5], cancer targeted photothermal therapy [6], cancer targeted therapy [7], and so on. Recently, a boronate affinity-assisted controllable oriented surface imprinting [8] was developed, allowing for high-specificity recognition of non-glycoproteins and non-glycopeptides. Thus, such advanced MIPs provided versatile and powerful artificial receptors for many promising applications, particularly precision diagnostics and nano medicine. This talk mainly introduces these controllably prepared MIPs and their applications in affinity separation, disease diagnosis, single-cell analysis, bioimaging and cancer therapy.

Selected references

[1] Li L, Lu Y, Bie ZJ, Chen HY, Liu Z. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2013, 52, 7451.
[2] Bie ZJ, Chen Y, Ye J, Wang SS, Liu Z. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2015, 54, 10211 (Very important paper, ESI highly cited paper).
[3] Xing RR, Wang SS, Bie ZJ, He H, Liu Z. Nat. Protoc., 2017, 12, 964 (ESI highly cited paper).
[4] Ye J, Chen Y, Liu Z. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2014, 53, 10386.
[5] Liu J, Yin DY, Wang SS, Chen HY, Liu Z. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2016, 55, 13215.
[6] Yin DY, Li XL, Ma YY, Liu Z. Chem. Commun., 2017, 53, 6716.
[7] Dong YR, Li W, Gu ZK, Xing RR, Ma YY, Zhang Q, Liu Z. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2019, DOI: 10.1002/anie.201904860 (Hot paper).
[8] Xing RR, Ma YY, Wang YJ, Wen YR, Liu Z. Chem. Sci., 2019, 10, 1831.