An improved purification procedure for rat liver lysosomal phospholipase A1

A purification procedure is presented for the isolation of lysosomal acid phospholipase A1 (PLA1) from livers of non-pretreated rats, in a high yield and purity. The purification starts from a crude mitochondrial-lysosomal fraction. PLA1 is solubilised and subsequently purified by chromatography on concanavalin A-Sepharose, by chromatofocusing, and by gel filtration. After chromatofocusing, the enzyme is already purified 50200-fold with a yield of 50%, and after gel filtration 56600-fold with a yield of 7%. Purified PLA1 exhibits a specific activity of approx. 8.2 mumol phosphatidylethanolamine (preferred substrate) hydrolysed per min per mg protein, and upon chromatofocusing an apparent isoelectric point of 5.3 Gel filtration of purified PLA1 suggests a molecular mass of about 29 kDa, whereas in SDS-PAGE two proteins of 27 kDa and 55 kDa (mass ratio about 1/2) were visualised.