Paper-based smart sampling for bottom-up protein analysis

Abstract

Paper-based sample collection has gained increased attention during the past few decades for its simplicity and applicability to a wide range of matrices and analytes. Particularly for sampling of blood. Compared to traditional venous sample collection, paper based sampling introduces many benefits such as; it is non-invasive, it uses small volumes, has increased storage stability and is much less biohazardous. When combined with mass spectrometry for determination of low abundant protein biomarkers, the sample preparation from paper prior to analysis is time consuming and most often demanding. In this work, polymer coated filter paper has been immobilized with proteases and antibodies to serve as the sampling materials and to accelerate the current workflow. The sampling materials was tested and compared to conventional analytical strategies and proved promising performance of determination of low abundant biomarkers in serum and freshly collected whole blood. The sampling materials showed significantly less manual laboratory labour and time consumption as well as increased performance. With future optimization, the sampling concept and its ideas have the potential to readily be incorporated as a viable sampling techniques applied to different strategies such as early stage cancer identification and doping analysis.