Simple boric acid-based fluorescent focusing for sensing of glucose and glycoprotein via multipath moving supramolecular boundary electrophoresis chip.

Boric acid-based fluorescent complex probe of BBV-HPTS (boronic acid-based benzyl viologen (BBV) and hydroxypyrene trisulfonic acid trisodium salt (HPTS)) was rarely used for sensitive sensing of saccharide (especially glycoprotein) via electrophoresis. We proposed a novel model of moving supramolecular boundary (MSB) formed with monosaccharide or glycoprotein in microcolumn and the complex probe of BBV-HPTS in the cathodic injection tube, developed a method of MSB fluorescent focusing for sensitive recognition of monosaccharide and glycoprotein, and designed a special multipath capillary electrophoresis (CE) chip for relative experiments. As a proof of concept, glucose and hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) were respectively used as the mode saccharide and glycoprotein for the relevant demonstration. The experiments revealed that (i) the complex of BBV-HPTS could interact with free glucose or bound one in glycoprotein; (ii) the fluorescent signal was a function of glucose or glycoprotein content approximately; and (iii) interestingly the fluorescent band motion was dependent on glucose content. The developed method had the following merits: (i) low cost; (ii) low limit of detection (down to 1.39 pg/mL for glucose and 2.0 pg per capillary HbA1c); and (iii) high throughput (up to 12 runs or more per patch) and speed (less than 5 min). The developed method has potential use for sensitive monitoring of monosaccharide and glycoprotein in biomedical samples.