Perfluorinated probes for non-covalent protein recognition and isolation

Perfluorinated organic compounds (PFCs) are non-toxic, bio-compatible, -available and -orthogonal species which possess the unique ability to segregate away from both polar and nonpolar solvents producing a compact fluorophilic phase. Traditional techniques of fluorous chemical proteomics are generally applied to enrich biological samples in target protein(s) exploiting this property of PFCs to build fluorinated probes able to covalently bind to protein ensembles and being selectively extracted by fluorophilic solvents. Aiming at building a strategy able to avoid irreversible modification of the analyzed bio-system, a novel fully non-covalent probe is presented as an enabling tool for the recognition and isolation of biological protein(s). In our strategy, both the fluorophilic extraction and the bio-recognition of a selected protein successfully occur via the establishment of reversible but selective interactions.