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Updated: Feb 15, 2026

Use of the Protease Fluorescent Detection Kit to Determine Protease Activity
Published on: August 4, 2009
Determination of Aconitase Activity: A Substrate of the Mitochondrial Lon Protease
1Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Cáncer (CIBERONC); Departamento de Bioquímica y Biología Molecular, Universidad de Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain. pmq@degradome.uniovi.es.
Abstract:
Mitochondrial aconitase is a reversible enzyme that catalyzes the conversion of citrate to isocitrate in the tricarboxylic acid cycle. Mitochondrial aconitase is very sensitive to oxidative inactivation and can aggregate and accumulate in the mitochondrial matrix causing mitochondrial dysfunction. Lon protease, one of the major quality control proteases in mitochondria, degrades oxidized aconitase maintaining mitochondrial homeostasis. This chapter describes a step-by-step protocol for a simple and reliable measurement of mitochondrial aconitase, as well as citrate synthase activity, using isolated mitochondria from cells. The protocol is simple and fast, and it is optimized for a 96-well plate using a microplate reader.
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Rate-Determining Steps
In a multistep reaction mechanism, one of the elementary steps progresses significantly slower than the others. This slowest step is called the rate-limiting step (or rate-determining step). A reaction cannot proceed faster than its slowest step, and hence, the rate-determining step limits the overall reaction rate.
The concept of rate-determining step can be understood from the analogy of a 4-lane freeway with a short-stretch of traffic-bottleneck caused due to...

