Research

The specific intercellular recognitions between ligands and protein receptors, such as those between the saccharide chains pervaded on the cell surface of nearly all living organisms and their cognitive glycoprotein receptors, are a class of pivotal natural interactions that trigger cell responses, ultimately leading to the activation of a number of crucial physiological and pathological events such as cell-cell adhesion, cell development and differentiation, virus invasion, bacterial infection, and cancer metastasis.

The ingenious probing of the sugarbased ligand-transmembrane receptor interactions therefore represents a significant subject of research that will contribute to the study of the “glycomics” as well as facilitate the early-state disease diagnosis and drug and vaccine development.

Researchers from Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, CAS, and East China University of Science and Technology unraveled, for the first time, that a hepatic cancer cell line expressing transmembrane glycoprotein receptors that exclusively recognize a sugar ligand can be specifically probed by a simple devised GalNAc-pervaded GO sensor in a fluorogenic manner.

The economical nanocomposites based on π-stacking of N-acetyl glycosyl rhodamine B to graphene oxide (GO) were simply prepared. These "sweet" GO-materials are proven to be admirable for the fluorogenic recognition of specific intercellular sugar-based ligand-glycoprotein receptor interactions of interest relative to the countless known and unknown physiological and pathological events.

This research work was performed by the graduate student WEI Xiao-li and colleagues in LI Jia’s and CHEN Guorong’s groups. The development of such a easy-to-construct, specific "sugar cluster Graphene" biological probes based on the carbohydrate binding protein from the cell surface and the star material "Graphene" will provide a new, effective application of glycomics and new materials for probing intercellular sugar-receptor interactions relative to the countless known and unknown physiological and pathological events. On May 17th, the research work has been recently published in Advanced Materials ((IF 14.829) 2013, 25: 4097), which was also chose as the cover story. Optimization and demonstration of generality of this sensing system are currently underway.

Structures of glycosaminyl rhodamine (GR) 1 and GR 2 , and sketch of the devised ﬂuorogenic graphene oxide (GO)-GR nanocomposites. And the cover of Advanced Materials (Image by SIMM)

Full text：http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201300187/pdf