Cells express different levels and types of receptors on the cell membrane under distinct physio- and pathological conditions. The over-expression of certain transmembrane receptors is often a critical signature of diseases. The ingenious probing of the sugar 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.

With the continuous interest in preparing sugar-based electrodes and sugar-receptor interaction based-live cell capturing, researchers from Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, CAS, and East China University of Science and Technology have developed an integrated pyrenyl glycoquinone (GQ) construct that can be firmly immobilized onto graphene-spotted screen printed electrodes (SPEs) by strongπ-interactions. The resulting GQ-decorated graphene SPEs produce an intrinsic voltammetric signal of quinone, which makes possible the label-free detection of selective sugar–protein interactions. The research demonstrate that the SPEs constructed have the ability to track the up- or down-regulated level of pathogenic receptors (the asialoglycoprotein receptors and Mannose receptor) expressed by live cells (hepG2 and M2 macrophage respectively) using simple electrochemical techniques. This study also prove that such detections are based on sugar–receptor interactions by the specific receptor knock-down or induction and free sugar competition.

This work was accomplished by graduate students and colleagues in CHEN Guorong’s，LONG YiTao’s and LI Jia’s groups, providing novel insight into the development of portable and low-cost devices suitable for the tracking of dynamic cellular events with live cells. The findings have been published in Chemical Science (2015, 6:1996.)

Contact person: LONG Yitao (ytlong@ecust.edu.cn), LI Jia (jli@simm.ac.cn)

Full text：http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2015/sc/c4sc03614j

Cartoon depicting the dynamic tracking of up-or down- regulated pathogenic receptors expressed by different cells using pyrenyl mannosyl(Man) and Galactosyl(Gal) anthraquinones decorated on grapheme -spottedn screen printed electrodes(SPEs).