Development of diced electrophoresis gel assay for screening disease-related enzymatic activities

Abstract

We have been developing techniques for monitoring the specified enzymatic activities with the use of small molec-ular fluorescent substrates (molecules that become fluorescent upon cleavage by specific enzymes) that enable high-ly sensitive detection of the targeted activities. Based on the techniques, we have developed the novel methodology to search for cell-type-specific and disease-related enzymatic activities by comprehensively evaluating enzymatic activities in bio-samples and identifying the enzymes that metabolize specified substrates. With those techniques, we have successfully characterized several disease-related alternations of enzymatic functions from enzymome (to-tal of active enzymes in living systems).