Preparation of mesoporous carbon material derived from Metal-Organic Frameworks and its application in selective capture of endogenous peptides from human serum.

Highly selective and efficient extraction of endogenous peptides from complex biological systems plays an important role in proteomics. In this study, an ordered mesoporous magnetic material (denoted as CZIF) with micron size (1 µm) was facilely synthesized by direct pyrolyzing ZIF-67 under N2 atmosphere for efficient and selective enrichment of endogenous peptides. The CZIF keeps the morphology of the original ZIF-67 crystal with enlarged pore size of 3.67 nm and a specific surface area of 156.58 m2/g, and shows weak magnetism (18 emu/g). The loading buffer and eluting buffer were optimized to improve the sensitivity and selectivity of the CZIF. Benefiting from the highly graphitization of the CZIF, the limit detection of BSA digest as low as 0.2 fmol/μL was achieved, showing good enrichment sensitivity for peptides. The uniform mesoporous help to achieve high selectivity by excluding proteins (BSA tryptic digest/BSA = 1:1000). The CZIF can be repeatedly used (n ≥ 5) without further treatment. Moreover, 402 endogenous peptides were enriched from human serum by CZIF, which indicated that CZIF was a promising candidate for the extraction of endogenous peptides from complex biologicals.