A new application of papain: As a peroxidase-like catalyst for fluorometric detection of uric acid

Abstract

Papain, as a classical cysteine protease, has been widely used in the food, pharmaceutical, chemical, and cosmetic fields. However, there are few information about the peroxidase-like activity of papain catalyzed substrate to produce fluorescence. In this study, we found that papain can catalyze H2O2 to convert o-phenylenediamine (OPD), and generate fluorescence emission at 550 nm under 430 nm excitation. Based on this foundation, we report a papain/OPD/H2O2 system for fluorescence detection of uric acid. The method exhibits a wide linear range of 10–1000 μM with a limit-of-detection of 4.6 μM, and has been successfully used to detect uric acid in human serum. This study paves the way for the application of papain as catalyst for fluorescence detection of different target biomolecules, such as cholesterol, glucose, lactate, for which H2O2 is a product of oxidoreductase enzymes.