Mobility shift-based electrophoresis coupled with fluorescent detection enables real-time enzyme analysis of carbohydrate sulfatase activity



Byrne, Dominic, London, James, Eyers, Patrick ORCID: 0000-0002-9220-2966, Yates, Edwin ORCID: 0000-0001-9365-5433 and Cartmell, Alan ORCID: 0000-0002-5512-249X
(2020) Mobility shift-based electrophoresis coupled with fluorescent detection enables real-time enzyme analysis of carbohydrate sulfatase activity. 2020.12.01.406876-.

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Abstract

Sulfated carbohydrate metabolism is a fundamental process, which occurs in all domains of life. Carbohydrate sulfatases are enzymes that remove sulfate groups from carbohydrates and are essential to the depolymerisation of complex polysaccharides. Despite their biological importance, carbohydrate sulfatases are poorly studied and challenges remain in accurately assessing the activity, specificity and kinetic parameters. Most notably, separation of desulfated products from sulfated substrates is currently a time-consuming process. In this paper, we describe the development of rapid capillary electrophoresis coupled to substrate fluorescence detection as a high-throughput and facile means of analysing carbohydrate sulfatase activity. The approach has utility for the determination of both kinetic and inhibition parameters and is based on existing microfluidic technology coupled to a new synthetic fluorescent 6S-GlcNAc carbohydrate substrate. Furthermore, we compare this technique in terms of both time and resources, to high performance anion exchange chromatography and NMR-based methods, which are the two current ‘gold standards’ for enzymatic carbohydrate sulfation analysis. Our study clearly demonstrates the advantages of mobility shift assays for the quantification of near real-time carbohydrate desulfation by purified sulfatases, and could support the search for small molecule inhibitors of these disease-associated enzymes. <h4>One sentence summary</h4> Sulfatases remove sulfate groups from biomolecules; in this study we report a rapid and robust capillary electrophoresis assay for the quantification of carbohydrate desulfation.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Bioengineering
Divisions: Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences > Institute of Systems, Molecular and Integrative Biology
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 13 Jul 2021 07:15
Last Modified: 14 Mar 2024 17:48
DOI: 10.1101/2020.12.01.406876
Open Access URL: http://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.01.406876
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3129851