Kinetic substrate quantification by fitting the enzyme reaction curve to the integrated Michaelis-Menten equation.

The reliability of kinetic substrate quantification by nonlinear fitting of the enzyme reaction curve to the integrated Michaelis-Menten equation was investigated by both simulation and preliminary experimentation. For simulation, product absorptivity epsilon was 3.00 mmol(-1) L cm(-1) and K(m) was 0.10 mmol L(-1), and uniform absorbance error sigma was randomly inserted into the error-free reaction curve of product absorbance A(i) versus reaction time t(i) calculated according to the integrated Michaelis-Menten equation. The experimental reaction curve of arylesterase acting on phenyl acetate was monitored by phenol absorbance at 270 nm. Maximal product absorbance A(m) was predicted by nonlinear fitting of the reaction curve to Eq. (1) with K(m) as constant. There were unique A(m) for best fitting of both the simulated and experimental reaction curves. Neither the error in reaction origin nor the variation of enzyme activity changed the background-corrected value of A(m). But the range of data under analysis, the background absorbance, and absorbance error sigma had an effect. By simulation, A(m) from 0.150 to 3.600 was predicted with reliability and linear response to substrate concentration when there was 80% consumption of substrate at sigma of 0.001. Restriction of absorbance to 0.700 enabled A(m) up to 1.800 to be predicted at sigma of 0.001. Detection limit reached A(m) of 0.090 at sigma of 0.001. By experimentation, the reproducibility was 4.6% at substrate concentration twice the K(m), and A(m) linearly responded to phenyl acetate with consistent absorptivity for phenol, and upper limit about twice the maximum of experimental absorbance. These results supported the reliability of this new kinetic method for enzymatic analysis with enhanced upper limit and precision.