Rational construction of fluorescent molecular imprinted polymers for highly efficient glycoprotein detection

The enrichment of glycoproteins by fluorescence molecular imprinting has shown an attractive application prospect, however, its specificity and sensitivity in actual sample analysis remain a significant challenge. In this work, a novel fluorescent molecular imprinted nanoplatform (MMIPs@QDs) was constructed for the efficient recognition and determination of glycoproteins by combining the glycopeptide template and the post-imprinting modification of nitrogen-doped graphene quantum dots. The synthetic MMIPs@QDs exhibited high adsorption capacity and rapid binding kinetics. Satisfying selectivity and sensitivity were obtained using MMIPs@QDs, with an imprinting factor of 7.71 and a limit of detection of 0.20 μg mL⁻¹, respectively. The efficiency and applicability of this proposed method were validated by the detection of ovalbumin in egg white samples, showed high recoveries (94.3%−100.2%) and acceptable relative standard deviation (1.79%−7.36%). This fluorescent molecular imprinted nanoplatform provides a new approach to address the limitations of existing protein detection techniques.