In this study, an epitope‐imprinting strategy was employed for the dynamic display of bioactive ligands on a material interface. An imprinted surface was initially designed to exhibit specific affinity towards a short peptide (i.e., the epitope). This surface was subsequently used to anchor an epitope‐tagged cell‐adhesive peptide ligand (RGD: Arg‐Gly‐Asp). Owing to reversible epitope‐binding affinity, ligand presentation and thereby cell adhesion could be controlled. As compared to current strategies for the fabrication of dynamic biointerfaces, for example, through reversible covalent or host–guest interactions, such a molecularly tunable dynamic system based on a surface‐imprinting process may unlock new applications in in situ cell biology, diagnostics, and regenerative medicine.

Intelligent stimuli-responsive molecularly imprinted polymers (SR-MIPs) have attracted considerable research interest in recent years due to the potential applications in drug delivery, biotechnology and separation sciences. This review comprehensively summarizes various SR-MIPs, including the design and applications of thermo-responsive MIPs, pH-responsive MIPs, photo-responsive MIPs, biomolecule-responsive MIPs and ion-responsive MIPs. Besides the development of current SR-MIPs, the advantages as well as the disadvantages of current SR-MIPs were also displayed from different angles, especially preparation methods and application fields. We believe this review will be helpful to guide the design, development and application of SR-MIPs.

We report an approach integrating the synthesis of protein‐imprinted nanogels (“plastic antibodies”) with a highly sensitive assay employing templates attached to magnetic carriers. The enzymes trypsin and pepsin were immobilized on amino‐functionalized solgel‐coated magnetic nanoparticles (magNPs). Lightly crosslinked fluorescently doped polyacrylamide nanogels were subsequently produced by high‐dilution polymerization of monomers in the presence of the magNPs. The nanogels were characterised by a novel competitive fluorescence assay employing identical protein‐conjugated nanoparticles as ligands to reversibly immobilize the corresponding nanogels. Both nanogels exhibited K_d<10 pM for their respective target protein and low cross‐reactivity with five reference proteins. This agrees with affinities reported for solid‐phase‐synthesized nanogels prepared using low‐surface‐area glass‐bead supports. This approach simplifies the development and production of plastic antibodies and offers direct access to a practical bioassay.

Phosphospecific enrichment techniques and mass spectrometry (MS) are essential tools for comprehending the cellular phosphoproteome. Here, we report a fast and simple approach for low sequence-bias phosphoserine (pS) peptide capture and enrichment that is compatible with low biological or clinical sample input. The approach exploits molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs, “plastic antibodies”) featuring tight neutral binding sites for pS or pY that are capable of cross-reacting with phosphopeptides of protein proteolytic digests. The versatility of the resulting method was demonstrated with small samples of whole-cell lysate from human embryonic kidney (HEK) 293T cells, human neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cells, mouse brain or human cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Following pre-fractionation of trypsinized proteins by strong cation exchange (SCX) chromatography, pS-MIP enrichment led to the identification of 924 phosphopeptides in the HEK 293T whole-cell lysate, exceeding the number identified by TiO₂-based enrichment (230). Moreover, the phosphopeptides were extracted with low sequence bias and showed no evidence for the characteristic preference of TiO₂ for acidic amino acids (aspartic and glutamic acid). Applying the method to human CSF led to the discovery of 47 phosphopeptides belonging to 24 proteins and revealed three previously unknown phosphorylation sites.