Isolation of lysyl hydroxylase, an enzyme of collagen synthesis, from chick embryos as a homogeneous protein.

Two procedures are reported for the purification of lysyl hydroxylase, both procedures involving (NH4)2SO4 fractionation, affinity chromatography on concanavalin A-agarose and elution of the column with ethylene glycol. The additional steps in procedure A consist of gel filtration and chromatography on a hydroxyapatite column, and in procedure B of affinity chromatography on collagen linked to agarose and gel filtration. The best preparations obtained with either of the two procedures were pure when examined by sodium dodecyl sulphate-polyacrylamide-disc-gel or slab-gel electrophoresis, but about half of the preparations obtained by procedure A had minor contaminants. The specific activity of a typical preparation purified by procedure B was 13 4000 times that of the 15 000 g supernatant of the chick-embryo homogenate, with a recovery of about 4%. The molecular weight of the pure enzyme was bout 200 000 by gel filtration, and that of the enzyme subunit about 85 000 by sodium dodecyl sulphate/polyacrylamide-disc-gel or slab-gel electrophoresis. It is suggested that the active enzyme is a dimer consisting of only one type of monomer, and that a previously described enzyme form with an apparent molecular weight of about 550 000 is a polymeric form of this dimer. The catalytic-centre activity of the pure enzyme, as determined with a saturating concentration of a synthetic peptide substrate and under conditions specified, was about 3-4 mol/s per mol.