Swiss scientists have revealed the fingerprint of lipase enzymes.

Jean-Louis Reymond and Johann Grognux at the University of Berne have produced a microarray system that can be used to create a unique map of an enzyme's activity. 'We usually think of [enzyme] activity in terms of one substrate or maybe two. With fingerprinting we want to provide comparative data on many different substrates,' explained Reymond.

Fingerprints of lipase enzymes

'The detection of enzyme activities with specific substrates is an essential tool in bioscience. Lipases are ubiquitous enzymes of interest for biotransformations and as disease markers,' said Reymond. Their fingerprints could help scientists evaluating enzyme function and structure-activity relationships, he explained, and could prove useful tools for routine enzyme identification.

To make their microarray, Reymond and Grognux printed a grid of hundreds of enzyme substrates onto a glass slide. They then washed the array with a lipase solution, detecting which substrates had reacted by tagging the products with a red fluorescent dye. In this way the activities of several lipases were translated into fluorescent patterns of dots unique to each enzyme. The patterns provide the first example of lipase fingerprinting using microarrays.

Although Reymond's group had classified enzymes by their reactivity in previous work, this was difficult to implement on a large scale and consumed large volumes of both substrate and enzyme. According to Reymond, the current assay greatly improves on this in terms of throughput and reduced amounts of sample. 

Michael Spencelayh