The overall goal of this procedure is to accelerate the detection of physiological substrates for potential lipases and phosopholipases. This method can help answer key questions in the Entomology field, such as how phospholipases contribute to lipid remodeling in biological membranes. The main advantage of this technique is that the optimization of enzymatic activity and the search for the natural substrate for the enzyme can be performed independently.
Though this method can provide insight into substrate specificity of bacterial lipases and phospholipases, it can also be modified to study hydrolases of any other model organisms. We first had the idea for this method when we searched for an enzyme activity that could degrade the intrinsic membrane lipid phosphatidylcholine inorhizobium meliloti. To prepare cell-free protein extracts, defrost bacterial cell suspensions and store them on ice.
Then, pass the cell suspensions three times through a cold pressure cell at 20, 000 pounds per square inch. Remove the in-tact cells and cell debris by centrifugation at 5, 000 times g for 30 minutes, at four degrees Celsius. After centrifugation, prepare aliquots of 100 and 500 microliters from the supernatant for subsequent analysis.
Set up the previously-optimized enzyme assay using the pipetting schemes tabulated in the text protocol. For an initial coverage of distinct enzyme activities, use artificial substrates that yield a colored product upon hydrolysis, such as para-nitrophenol or PNP derivatives. Follow the time course for an increase of absorbance at 405 nanometers, due to the formation of PNP in a spectrophotometer at 30 degrees Celsius over a five-minute period.
Finally, perform calculations as described in the text protocol. For radio labeling of lipids, prepare an overnight pre-culture of an organism of interest in five milliliters of the desired culture medium and grow at 30 degrees Celsius. From the pre-culture, inoculate into 20 millimeters of fresh medium in a 100-millimeter culture flask, to obtain an initial optical density at 620 nanometers of 0.3 for the culture.
Next, transfer a one-milliliter aliquot of the culture to a 14-milliliter sterile polystyrene round bottom tube under sterile conditions. Add one microcurie of 114 c acetate to the one-milliliter culture. Then, incubate the liquid culture under agitation at 30 degrees Celsius for a period of 24 hours.
At the end of the incubation period, transfer the culture to a 1.5 milliliter microcentrifuge tube and centrifuge at 12, 000 times g at room temperature for five minutes. Resuspend the pellet in 100 microliters of water. At this point, store the cell suspension at minus 20 degrees Celsius or immediately continue with the extraction of polar lipids.
To perform the extraction of polar lipids, add 375 microliters of a two to one methanol to chloroform solution to the 100 microliters of aqueous cell suspension. Vortex the sample for 30 seconds before incubating for five minutes at room temperature. Following incubation, centrifuge for five minutes at 12, 000 times g at room temperature.
Then, transfer the supernatant to a new 1.5 milliliter microcentrifuge tube. Next, add 125 microliters of chloroform and 125 microliters of water to the supernatant. After vortexing for 30 seconds, centrifuge the sample for one minute at 12, 000 times g at room temperature.
Transfer the lower chloroform phase to a fresh tube. Then, dry the solution with a stream of nitrogen gas. Dissolve the dried lipids in 100 microliters of chloroform to methanol solution.
For separation of neutral polar lipids by thin layer chromatography, apply three microliter aliquots of the lipid samples, on a high performance thin-layer chromatography silica gel aluminum sheet, starting two centimeters from the edges of the plate. If multiple samples are analyzed in one-dimensional chromatography, keep a distance of at least 1.5 centimeters between the different sample application spots. Transfer the mobile phase to a TLC developing chamber, internally coated with chromatography paper.
Cover with a glass plate to let the chamber saturate for 30 minutes. Transfer the HPTLC Silica Gel aluminum sheet with the dried lipid samples to the chamber. Allow the plate to develop for 30 minutes in a closed chamber before removing the plate.
Then, let the solvents dry off in a flow hood for two hours. Once the developed TLC sheet is dry, incubate it with a photostimulable luminescence screen in a closed cassette for three days. Then, expose the incubated screen to a PSL scanner and acquire a virtual image of the separated radio-labeled lipids.
To determine diacylglycerol, or DAG, lipase activity, first add 5, 000 CPM of 14 C-labeled DAG to a 1.5 milliliter microcentrifuge tube. Also, add a solution of Triton X-100 to the tube and mix by vortex. Dry the solution under a stream of nitrogen.
For a final 100 microliter assay, add Tris-HCl buffer, a sodium chloride solution, and bi-distilled water. Vortex for five seconds. Initiate the reaction by adding five microliters of enzyme to the solution.
Incubate the solution at 30 degrees Celsius for four hours. Stop the reaction by the addition of 250 microliters of methanol and 125 microliters of chloroform, before extracting lipids as described earlier in this video. Proceed to analyze neutral polar lipids by 1DTLC and subsequent PSL imaging as before.
Although the predicted phosopholipase SMc01003 shows activity with artificial para-nitrophenol acyl esters, the activity is only double or triple of the background activity present in cell-free extracts of Escherichia coli, in which no foreign gene had been expressed. This indicates that para-nitrophenyl acyl esters don't seem to be good substrates for SMc01003. Whereas cell-free extracts of E.Coli cannot degrade diacylglycerol, extracts of strains in which the predicted phospholipase, SMc01003, had been expressed, caused a degradation of diacylglycerol.
Though SMc01003 was predicted to be a phospholipase, it is actually a diacylglycerol lipase that degrades diacylglycerol to monoacylglycerol and one fatty acid. It then degrades monoacylglycerol further to glycerol and another fatty acid. Once mastered, this technique can be done in a few weeks if it's performed properly.
After watching this video, you should have a good understanding of how to optimize enzyme activities of lipases and phospholipases, and how to continue with the search for their physiological substrates. A crucial advantage of this procedure is that the optimization of the enzyme activity can be separated from the search for the natural enzyme substrate. Don't forget that working with organic solvents or radioactive substances can be extremely hazardous and the required precautions should always be taken while performing this procedure.
