Collagenase II

Detailed Product Description

APPLICATIONS:

This product is suitable for the isolation of fat cells from rat adipose tissue by the method of Rodbell.15 Fat cells are then screened for metabolic integrity by measuring glucose oxidation rates with and without insulin addition.

This product may also be used for the disaggregation of human tumor, mouse kidney, human adult and fetal brain, lung and many other tissues, particularly epithelium. It is also effective in liver and kidney perfusion studies, digestion of pancreas, isolation of nonparenchymal rat liver cells and hepatocyte preparation.

Although the term collagenase implies that there is a single enzyme produced by Cl. histolyticum, this is not the case. Crude collagenases are mixtures of enzyme activities (mostly proteases) secreted by Cl. histolyticum. All may contain 10 to 18 components (by electrophoresis), only 8 of which have been identified. The products differ by the amount of the components absolute and relative to each other.

The component enzymes in crude are two specific collagenases (measured as FALGPA units/mg),

clostripain (measured as BAEE activity after reduction of this product with DTT) and a neutral protease (measured as caseinase). In the crude collagenase, the clostripain is mostly inactive, oxidized. An important feature for use in tissue dissociation is the ratio of collagenase to protease.

Effective release of cells from tissue depends on the action of both the two collagenase enzymes and the neutral protease, for either alone is not very effective.