RESEARCH ARTICLE
Comparison of Two Measures of Missing Cofactor in Cofactor-Dependent Enzymes: Proportion Versus Relative Increase
Tomas Hansson*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2012Volume: 5
First Page: 16
Last Page: 21
Publisher ID: TOBIOMJ-5-16
DOI: 10.2174/1875318301205010016
Article History:
Received Date: 12/06/2012Revision Received Date: 23/08/2012
Acceptance Date: 28/08/2012
Electronic publication date: 30/11/2012
Collection year: 2012
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The degree of missing cofactor in a cofactor-dependent enzyme is widely used as a biomarker of cofactor defi-ciency. The degree of missing cofactor can be expressed either as the proportion of enzyme without cofactor, or as the rel-ative increase in enzyme with cofactor after addition of excess cofactor to the sample. Especially for enzymes with thia-mine pyrophosphate (TPP) as a cofactor, the relative increase (TPP-effect) has been used in a majority of studies, and its use seems to prevail without consideration of the proportion (latency) as a better alternative. In this letter, the statistical properties of the two measures are compared in the context of a thiamine-dependent enzyme. Proportion is a more bal-anced and sensitive measure than relative increase, and simulation shows that proportion is associated with equal or high-er statistical power than relative increase. The power difference can be as high as 0.12.