Enzymometer – printed substrate assay plate

Agriculture
Agriculture / Farming
Biotechnology
Consumer goods
Food
Healthcare
Industrial Goods & Machinery
Industrial machines
Pharmaceutical
A tool to measure the enzymatic activity of a solution in the form of an assay plate on which multiple native (no added chromophore) biopolymer substrates are printed.

Benefits

  • Ease of use (no special skills required)
  • No additional equipment required (only a 20x microscope)
  • Precise: <3% error
  • Multi-well support (e.g. 96 or 384 wells or more)
  • Compatible with high throughput screening methods
  • More robust due to the lack of any interfering chemical interactions

Issue

In all fields that use enzymes (agri-food, pharmaceuticals, industrial chemistry, etc.), the research and development of better enzymes and cocktails is a long and laborious process. Thousands of tests are often required to test the usefulness, correct quantity, determine the correct level of activity, and confirm if the enzymatic cocktail developed or used is effective. Many additional tests are needed regularly to check quality standards are being adhered to. The number of tests to be carried out is thus multiplied when there are several different enzymatic solutions. The tests currently used are sometimes empirical or outdated. The processes used lead to long implementation delays and very long post-operational processing, poor repeatability, and lack of precision in measuring enzyme activity levels. These processes are costly or difficult to parallelize, generally giving no quantitative result but still requiring a dedicated test team, leading to an excess of labor. The complexity of the processes often also needs expensive laboratory equipment.

Solution

The solution developed is composed of a screening plate (e.g. 96 or 384 wells) on which are printed several dozen substrates (biopolymer), which enables quantitative enzymatic activity tests to be carried out simultaneously. This enables the best enzyme combinations to be identified more quickly and for enzyme activity to be measured quantitatively. All that is needed is contact between the substrate and the enzymatic solution to be tested. This enables a qualitative measurement, visible to the naked eye, or a precise quantitative measurement taken using a simple 20x microscope combined with dedicated software (results from hundreds of samples can be obtained through an automated display platform). This reaction is also faster than classic methods (30 minutes). Multiple enzymatic solutions can also be tested simultaneously across multiple substrates. This direct measurement, based on the degradation of the substrate, is very precise (<3% error) and consumes very little of the enzymatic solution (several μL per test). 2 substrates are being developed in series (arabinoxylan, beta-glucan), the others are available to order.

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