Synthesis of glycopolymers with specificity for bacterial strains via bacteria-guided polymerization

Yan Luo ^ab, Yan Gu ^ab, Ruyan Feng ^ab, John Brash ^ac, Ahmed M. Eissa ^d, David M. Haddleton^*d, Gaojian Chen ^*ab （陈高健）and Hong Chen ^*a（陈红）

^a The Key Lab of Health Chemistry and Molecular Diagnosis of Suzhou, College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Soochow University, 199 Ren-Ai Road, Suzhou, 215123, P. R. China.

^b Center for Soft Condensed Matter Physics and Interdisciplinary Research & School of Physical Science and Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou, 215006, P. R. China.

^c School of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S4L7, Canada.

^d Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK.

Chem. Sci., 2019, 10, 5251--5257

Identifying probiotics and pathogens is of great interest to the health of the human body. It is critical to develop microbiota-targeted therapies to have high specificity including strain specificity. In this study, we have utilized E. coli MG1655 bacteria as living templates to synthesize glycopolymers in situ with high selectivity. By this bacteria-sugar monomer-aptation-polymerization (BS-MAP) method, we have obtained glycopolymers from the surface of bacteria which can recognize template bacteria from two strains of E. coli and the specific bacteria-binding ability of glycopolymers was confirmed by both bacterial aggregation experiment and QCM-D measurements. Furthermore, the synthesized glycopolymers have shown a powerful inhibitory ability which can prevent bacteria from harming cells in both anti-infection and co-culture tests.

链接：https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/SC/C8SC05561K#!divAbstract