Abstract
Zymography is a technique for studying hydrolytic enzymes on the basis of substrate degradation. It is a powerful, but often misinterpreted, tool yielding information on potential hydrolytic activities, enzyme forms and the locations of active enzymes. In this Review, zymography techniques are compared in terms of advantages, limitations and interpretations. With in gel zymography, enzyme forms are visualized according to their molecular weights. Proteolytic activities are localized in tissue sections with in situ zymography. In vivo zymography can pinpoint proteolytic activity to sites in an intact organism. Future development of novel substrate probes and improvement in detection and imaging methods will increase the applicability of zymography for (reverse) degradomics studies.
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Acknowledgements
The present study was supported by funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 263307, by “Geconcerteerde OnderzoeksActies” GOA 2012 017 and GOA 2013 014, by the Fund for Scientific Research of Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) and by the University of Leuven Research Fund. The authors thank B. Crawford and J. Keow for providing Figure 2c.
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Vandooren, J., Geurts, N., Martens, E. et al. Zymography methods for visualizing hydrolytic enzymes. Nat Methods 10, 211–220 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2371
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2371
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