A protease assay using time-resolved lanthanide luminescence from an engineered calcium binding protein substrate

OBJECTIVES

The objective of this work was to demonstrate the utility of luminescence from lanthanides bound to a mutant of the Ca2+ binding protein, oncomodulin, to monitor protease activity.

DESIGN AND METHODS

A mutant of oncomodulin with a cysteine residue at position 57 located in the CD binding loop was conjugated to a salicylic acid group. The luminescence of Tb3+ resulting from electronic energy transfer from the salicylic acid group was monitored using time resolved lanthanide luminescence in the presence of proteolytic enzymes.

RESULTS

Low detection limits for subtilisin (150 pg), chymotrypsin (2.5 ng), cathepsin B (3.5 ng), and HIV-1 protease (25 ng) were found.

CONCLUSION

The simplicity of the assay coupled with its high level of sensitivity make it useful for the detection of protease at very low concentrations.

Synthetic approaches to continuous assays of retroviral proteases

This chapter has described a number of approaches for continuous assay of retroviral proteases using either chromogenic or fluorogenic synthetic substrates. The significant progress in this area has been catalyzed by the intense interest in HIV protease as a therapeutic target, but these versatile methods will be used widely in future for studies of many other proteases.

Stability of dimeric retroviral proteases

The determination of dimer stabilities for the retroviral proteases has proved more challenging than anticipated, but it is a tractable problem when careful attention is made to potential interferences. For investigations of retroviral proteases not yet characterized, the fundamentally rigorous sedimentation equilibrium and other biophysical techniques may yet provide useful Kd values. They are preferable to the indirect methods emphasized in this chapter but nevertheless should be coupled with basic considerations such as recovery of activity at the end of an experiment and the relevance of values obtained to other situations. In the likely event that nanomolar Kd values are encountered in new investigations, the assay techniques provide the most readily available methods for many laboratories. Because these methods are sensitive to anything that affects enzyme activity, the use of complementary methods to verify dimerization constants is imperative. Inactivating reactions not due to monomer formation should be explored, and the potential impact of those reactions on the constants being measured should be estimated. Most of the Kd and dimerization rate data available for retroviral proteases are obtained with the HIV-1 protease, with each investigator choosing methods and solvent conditions different from the others. The confusing diversity of results should be the impetus for a direct comparison of methods for the identification of the sources of differences. If more comprehensive and rigorous measures of the kinetics and thermodynamics of subunit aggregation are obtained, they might be coupled with the large volume of detailed structural data accumulating for this class of protein to provide insights into more general problems of protein-folding chemistry.