Analysis—Measurement of Protein and Enzyme Activity

Abstract

During a protein purification procedure, the most important thing to follow is the recovery of the protein you are isolating: by enzyme activity if it is an enzyme; by bioactivity of a non-enzymic protein; or simply by some convenient method of quantitating the desired component, e.g., electrophoretic analysis. The second important thing to know is the total amount of protein present in the fraction in which you have collected your enzyme/specific protein. From these two measurements, the percent recovery and the degree of purification can be calculated. Methods used for measuring enzymic activity will be described in Section 3.2; methods for measuring other sorts of bioactivity or quantitating specific proteins are, obviously, characteristic for each problem and so cannot be discussed in general.