Facile Preparation of Biocompatible Sulfhydryl Cotton Fiber-Based Sorbents by “Thiol–ene” Click Chemistry for Biological Analysis

Sulfhydryl cotton fiber (SCF) has been widely used as adsorbent for a variety of metal ions since 1971. Thanks to the abundant thiols on SCF, in this study, we reported a universal method for the facile preparation of SCF-based materials using "thiol-ene" click chemistry for the first time. With the proposed method, two types of SCF-based materials, phenylboronic acid grafted sulfhydryl cotton fiber (SCF-PBA) and zirconium phosphonate-modified sulfhydryl cotton fiber (SCF-pVPA-Zr(4+)), were successfully prepared. The grafted functional groups onto the thiol group of SCF were demonstrated by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). The prepared fibrous materials exhibited excellent fiber strength, good stability in aqueous or nonaqueous solutions, and great biocompatibility. Moreover, we developed filter-free in-pipet-tip SPE using these SCF-based materials as adsorbent for the enrichment of ribonucleosides, glycopeptides and phosphopeptides. Our results showed that SCF-PBA adsorbent can selectively capture ribonucleosides and glycopeptides from complex biological samples. And SCF-pVPA-Zr(4+) adsorbent exhibited high selectivity and capacity in the enrichment of phosphopeptides from the digestion mixture of β-casein and bovine serum albumin (BSA), as well as human serum and nonfat milk digest. Generally, the preparation strategy can be a universal method for the synthesis of other functionalized cotton-based adsorbents with special requirement in microscale biological analysis.