Tissue Dissociation Enzyme Neutral Protease Assessment

Neutral proteases, essential components of purified tissue dissociation enzymes required for successful human islet isolation, show variable activities and effects of substrate on their activities. Initially we used a spectrophotometric endpoint assay with azocasein substrate to measure neutral protease activity. After critical review of the results, we observed these data to be inconsistent and not correlating expected differences in specific activities between thermolysin and Bacillus polymyxa proteases. This observation led to the development of a fluorescent microplate assay using fluorescein isothyocyanate-conjugated bovine serum albumin (FITC-BSA) as the substrate. This simpler, more flexible method offered a homogeneous, kinetic enzyme assay allowing determination of steady state reaction rates of sample replicates at various dilutions. The assay had a linear range of 4- to 8-fold and interassay coefficients of variation for B polymyxa protease and thermolysin of <9% and <15%, respectively, which were lower than those using the spectrophotometric endpoint assay, namely, 54% and 36%, respectively. This format allowed for incorporation of enzyme inhibitors, as illustrated by addition of sulfhydryl protease inhibitors, which, consistent with earlier reports, strongly indicated that the main contaminant in purified collagenase preparations was clostripain. Determination of the specific activities for several purified neutral proteases showed that the B polymyxa and Clostridium histolyticum proteases had approximately 40% and 15% specific activities, respectively, of those obtained with purified thermolysin, indicating the different characteristics of neutral protease enzymes for cell isolation procedures.