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Updated: May 12, 2026

In Vitro Enzyme Measurement to Test Pharmacological Chaperone Responsiveness in Fabry and Pompe Disease
Published on: December 20, 2017
Comparison of activity indexes for recognizing enzyme mutants of higher activity with uricase as model
Juan Feng1, Hongbo Liu, Xiaolan Yang
1Unit for Analytical Probes and Protein Biotechnology, Key Laboratory of Clinical Laboratory Diagnostics of the Education Ministry, College of Laboratory Medicine, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, 400016, China. liaofeish@yahoo.com.
Background:
For screening a library of enzyme mutants, an efficient and cost-effective method for reliable assay of enzyme activity and a decision method for safe recognition of mutants of higher activity are needed. The comparison of activity concentrations of mutants in lysates of transformed Escherichia coli cells against a threshold is unsafe to recognize mutants of higher activity due to variations of both expression levels of mutant proteins and lysis efficiency of transformed cells. Hence, by a spectrophotometric method after verification to measure uricase activity, specific activity calculated from the level of total proteins in a lysate was tested for recognizing a mutant of higher activity.
Results:
During uricase reaction, the intermediate 5-hydroxyisourate interferes with the assay of uric acid absorbance, but the measurement of absorbance at 293 nm in alkaline borate buffer was reliable for measuring uricase initial rates within a reasonable range. The level of total proteins in a lysate was determined by the Bradford assay. Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis analysis supported different relative abundance of uricase mutant proteins in their lysates; activity concentrations of uricase in such lysates positively correlated with levels of total proteins. Receiver-operation-curve analysis of activity concentration or specific activity yielded area-under-the-curve close to 1.00 for recognizing a mutant with > 200% improvement of activity. For a mutant with just about 80% improvement of activity, receiver-operation-curve analysis of specific activity gave area-under-the-curve close to 1.00 while the analysis of activity concentration gave smaller area-under-the-curve. With the mean plus 1.4-fold of the standard deviation of specific activity of a starting material as the threshold, uricase mutants whose activities were improved by more than 80% were recognized with higher sensitivity and specificity.
Conclusion:
Specific activity calculated from the level of total proteins is a favorable index for recognizing an enzyme mutant with small improvement of activity.
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