Highly Porous Metal-Free Graphitic Carbon Derived from Metal–Organic Framework for Profiling of N-Linked Glycans

In this work, a highly efficient profiling of N-linked glycans was achieved by a facile and eco-friendly synthesized highly porous metal-free carbon material. The metal-free carbon was derived from a well-defined nanorod zinc metal–organic framework via the metal removal under a high-temperature carbonization, which exhibited a highly specific surface area of 1700 m2/g. After further oxidation, the oxidized metal-free carbon was applied to the selective isolation of N-linked glycans from complex biological samples due to the strong interaction between carbon and glycan as well as the size-exclusion mechanism. Twenty six N-linked glycans could be identified from the digest of a standard glycoprotein ovalbumin at a concentration of 0.01 μg/μL, and the detection limit of glycans could be down to 1 ng/μL with 21 N-linked glycans identified. When the mass ratio of the interfering protein bovine serum albumin vs a standard ovalbumin digest is up to 500:1, there were 24 N-glycans confidentially identified. From a real complex sample of a healthy human serum, there were 43 N-linked glycans identified after the enrichment of oxidized metal-free carbon. In a word, the metal-free carbon is opening up new prospect for the high-throughput identification of glycan.