Improving identification of molecularly imprinted monolith to benzoylation modified peptides by a deep eutectic solvents monomer-induced cooperation

In this study, a strategy of improving imprinting performance was developed using an enhanced cooperation effect of functional monomers based on deep eutectic solvents (DESs) monomer for the specific enrichment of benzoylation modified peptides. Zinc acrylate and DESs monomers were used as binary functional monomers, and ethylene glycol dimethacrylate was used as the cross-linking agent with SGRGKbz as template to prepare an imprinted monolith. It was observed that the use of DESs monomer significantly improveed the affinity of benzoylation imprinted monolith and increased the adsorption capacity. Under optimal conditions, the recovery and imprinting factor (IF) of the imprinted monolith for SGRGKbz can reach 93.0% and 10.58, respectively. The average recovery of SGRGKbz extracted from the spiked histone digestion solution can reach 88.4% (n = 5, RSD = 3.4%). After treatment with the benzoylation imprinted monolith, 12 benzoylation modified peptides, 13 benzoylation modified sites and 12 benzoylation proteins could be identified in the digestion of mouse liver protein, while only one of each benzoylation modified peptide, benzoylation modified site and benzoylation protein could be identified in the untreated digestion of mouse liver protein. The results indicated that the prepared imprinted monolith using DESs-based functional monomer was an effective method to increase the affinity of the resulting MIP.