Comparison of Optical and Gravimetric Methods for Detection of Chymotrypsin

Proteases play an important role in various biological as well as dairy industrial processes. In this work, we focused on chymotrypsin, which is an important protease in human digestion. Chymotrypsin also cleaves milk proteins, which makes it useful in the study of activity of milk proteases. In this work, we focused on detection of chymotrypsin using optical and gravimetric techniques, their peculiarities, and the limit of detection (LOD) (0.15 ± 0.005 nM and 0.64 ± 0.31 nM for optical and gravimetric methods, respectively). While the optical detection is easier to implement, the gravimetric method is more robust for sample preparation. Both methods could represent a novel assay for detection of chymotrypsin and other milk proteases.