cheap and fast enzyme activity assay? - (May/10/2011 )

Hi all,

I am a bit new to the research that I am trying to do and i do not quite work in a protein focused lab. My issue is that I am trying to determine if adding protein, any protein, to different solvents affects its enzymatic/conformational activity. Ideally though I need to be able to use somewhat massive amounts of protein, so the recombinant protein would have to be cheap (relatively speaking). Right now we are using BSA-FITC for our experiments, which is colorful but without a CD machine, I have no idea how to measure if it looses its structure. Currently we are using roughly 1mg of protein per experiment, so again whatever the alternative it would need to be abundant and cost effective. Also, I should mention that I do not have the equipment to grow my own protein.

All that said, does anyone have advice concerning this? An easy assay, or something along those lines that I could try?

Your help is GREATLY appreciated,
gfeldman

enzymatic reactions are not uniform but have different requirements; cheap available enzymes are f.i. lactate dehydrogenase