What are metabolism assays?

Metabolism is a complex process that lies at the core of biology. Metabolic changes can lead to a huge range of outcomes in different disease areas, from cancer or neurodegeneration to obesity and diabetes. Our assay kits enable you to analyze the pathways of metabolism in-depth in live cells, lysates, and biofluids with easy analysis on your plate reader. With 20 years of experience in manufacturing metabolism assay kits and over 14,000 citations in scientific publications, we can help you understand your cell or disease model, or how your target or compound affects your metabolic pathway/phenotype of interest.​

Benefits of our metabolism assays:

• Easy-to-use with a simple step-by-step procedure included with each kit,  most kits do not require any wash steps​.

• Consistent:  manufactured with strict QC criteria to ensure reproducible results and reliable long-term supply.

• Convenient: designed to deliver results with existing lab equipment, such as standard colorimetric and fluorometric plate readers, and with a range of sample types.​

• Choice: a broad range of assays and reagents across the key analytes and targets within the most important metabolic pathways.​

• Support assay scale-up: batch sizes up to 500 kits and individual assay components available for purchase to enable assay customization.

We manufacture three types of metabolism assay kits:​

 Enzyme activity assays​

• Used to measure the activity of purified enzymes or enzyme activity in biological samples, such as an alkaline phosphatase assay.​
• Based on the action of the enzyme in the sample to be tested, on a specific substrate, which either produces a chemical directly measurable by a colorimetric or fluorometric plate reader, or uses a subsequent series of enzymes to produce a measurable chemical.​
• Often include enzyme-positive controls and inhibitor-negative controls.​

Enzymatic assays to measure metabolic chemicals​

• Used to measure the amounts of chemicals such as lactate, glycogen, and fatty acids in biological samples.​
• Based on the same principles as enzyme activity assays, except that the initial enzyme substrate is the biological molecule in the sample to be tested.​

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Cell-based assays​

• Used to measure enzyme activity in live cells, the quantities of metabolic chemicals, or biological processes; for example, to assess levels of reactive oxygen species or changes in mitochondrial membrane potential, such as during cell death.​
• Often rely on chemicals that are taken up by cells and processed to produce a fluorescent readout, or in the case of the MTS assay or the ATP luminescence assay, there may be a colorimetric or luminometric readout.

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