• Journal of Life Science
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• v.29 no.12
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• pp.1408-1414
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• 2019

Enzymes are widely used in industrial applications such as detergents, food, feed production, pharmaceuticals and medical applications and major contributors to clean industrial products and processes. To screen, identify, and characterize the enzymes the zymography techniques are routinely used. The zymography technique is a simple, sensitive, and quantifiable technique that is widely used to detect functional enzymes following electrophoretic separation in sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS)-polyacrylamide gels. The method is a versatile two-stage technique involving protein separation by electrophoresis followed by the detection of enzyme activity in polyacrylamide gels under non-reducing conditions. It is based on SDS-polyacrylamide gel (PAG) copolymerization with substrates, which are degraded by the hydrolytic enzymes restored in enzyme reaction buffer after the electrophoretic separation. Any kind of biological sample can be applied and analyzed on zymography, including culture supernatants of microbes, plants extracts, blood, tissue culture fluids, enzymes in foods extracts and metaproteome. The advantage of zymography is that it is possible to directly detect the protein with activity on the electrophoretic gel as well as confirm the activity at the nanogram level. Thus, this zymography technology can be applied in various fields. However, these advantages are rather disadvantageous and can often lead to experimental errors. In this review, the advantages, disadvantages, and problem solving of zymography technique are described.

• BMB Reports
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• v.38 no.6
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• pp.763-765
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• 2005

A new simplified procedure for identifying human plasmin was developed using a DTT copolymerized agarose stacking gel (ASG) system. Agarose (1%) was used for the stacking gel because DTT inhibits the polymerization of acrylamide. Human plasmin showed the lowest activity at pH 9.0. There was a similar catalytically active pattern observed under acidic conditions (pH 3.0) to that observed under alkaline conditions (pH 10.0 or 11.0). Using the ASG system, the primary structure of the heavy chain could be established at pH 3.0. This protein was found to consist of three fragments, 45 kDa, 23 kDa, and 13 kDa. These results showed that the heavy chain has a similar structure to the autolysed plasmin (Wu et al., 1987b) but there is a different start amino acid sequence of the N-termini.