Approximated maximum adsorption of His-tagged enzyme/mutants on Ni2+-NTA for comparison of specific activities

By approximating maximum activities of six-histidine (6His)-tagged enzyme/mutants adsorbed on Ni2+-NTA-magnetic-submicron-particle (Ni2+-NTA-MSP), a facile approach was tested for comparing enzyme specific activities in cell lysates. On a fixed quantity of Ni2+-NTA-MSP, the activity of an adsorbed 6His-tagged enzyme/mutant was measured via spectrophotometry; the activity after saturation adsorption (Vs) was predicted from response curve with quantities of total proteins from the same lysate as the predictor; Vs was equivalent of specific activity for comparison. This approach required abundance of a 6His-tagged enzyme/mutant over 3% among total proteins in lysate, an accurate series of quantities of total proteins from the same lysate, the largest activity generated by enzyme occupying over 85% binding sites on Ni2+-NTA-MSP and the minimum activity as absorbance change rates of 0.003 min−1 for analysis. The prediction of Vs tolerated errors in concentrations of total proteins in lysates and was effective to 6His-tagged alkaline phosphatase and its 6His-tagged mutant in lysates. Notably, of those two 6His-tagged enzymes, Vs was effectively approximated with just one optimized quantity of lysates. Hence, this approach with Ni2+-NTA-MSP worked for comparison of specific activities of 6His-tagged enzyme/mutants in lysates when they had sufficient abundance among proteins and activities of adsorbed enzymes were measurable.