Sensitivity, Noise and Detection of Enzyme Inhibition in Progress Curves

Starting with the development of an enzymatic assay, where an enzyme in solution hydrolysed a solid-phase bound peptide, a model for the kinetics of enzyme action was introduced. This model allowed the estimation of kinetic parameters and enzyme activity for a system that has the peculiarity of not being saturable with the substrate, but with the enzyme. In a derivation of the model, it was found that the sensitivity of the signal to variations in the enzyme concentration had a transient increase along the reaction progress with a maximum at high substrate conversion levels. The same behaviour was derived for the sensitivity in classical homogeneous enzymatic assays and experimental evidence of this was obtained. The impact of the transient increase of the sensitivity on the error structure, and on the ability of homogeneous end-point enzymatic assays to detect competitive inhibition, came into focus. First, a non-monotonous shape in the standard deviation of progress curve data was found and it was attributed to the random dispersion in the enzyme concentration operating through the transient increase in the sensitivity. Second, a model for the detection limit of the quantity Ki/[I] (the IDL-factor) as a function of the substrate conversion level was developed for homogeneous end-point enzymatic assays. It was found that the substrate conversion level where the IDL-factor reached an optimum was beyond the initial velocity range. Moreover, at this optimal point not only the ability to detect inhibitors but also the robustness of the assays was maximized. These results may prove to be relevant in drug discovery for optimising end point homogeneous enzymatic assays that are used to find inhibitors against a target enzyme in compound libraries, which are usually big (>10000) and crowded with irrelevant compounds