Sample-Imprinted Polymer Potentially for Protein Depletion and Enrichment

Here we report a method to prepare protein-imprinted polymers in the presence of a real sample (chicken egg white), rather than any known purified proteins. By comparing the electrophoretic separation of the sample in the imprinted polymer and a control capillary, it's found such a sample-imprinted polymer could retain abundant species. As a result the signals of abundant proteins in the sample were removed or reduced in the electropherogram. Meanwhile new peaks appeared to stand for enrichment of the minor proteins in the same sample. This suggests a new way to investigate molecular imprinting, which means analyzing complicated samples based on their instinctive complexities, i.e., a series of polymers just imprinted by themselves.