A New Optimized Spectrophotometric Assay for the Measurement of Pyruvate Dehydrogenase's Activity

Pyruvate dehydrogenase is a key enzyme which plays a pivotal role in energy metabolism. In most of studies on pyruvate dehydrogenase, it is neccessary to measure the enzymatic activity of them. It was found in our previous study that existing assays for pyruvate dehydrogenase activity may not reflect exactly enzymatic activity on account of some negative interferences. We therefore developed a new spectrophotometric assay which is applicable for the measurement of pyruvate dehydrogenase activity in both purified pyruvate dehydrogenase and pyruvate dehydrogenase in Pyruvate dehydrogenase complex isolated mitochondria. Our findings suggest that the assay procedure has higher sensitivity and practicability than that of previous assay procedures.