eng Oriental Scientific Publishing Company Biosciences Biotechnology Research Asia 0973-1245 2016-05-06 9 1 239 242 9590 article N. A. Masdor 1 N. A. M. Said 1 Biotechnology Research Centre, MARDI, P. O. Box 12301, 50774 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The protease papain, in combination with the dye-binding coomassie protein assay of its substrate has been shown to be sensitive towards toxic heavy metals and has good potential as a preliminary screening method for detecting heavy metals in various samples. The original assay uses crude preparation and there is a possibility to improve its sensitivity towards heavy metals by removing interfering proteins. Using a combination of ion exchange and gel filtration chromatography, a 3.3 fold purification was achieved, and the partially purified fraction showed significantly lower IC50s (p<0.05) for all heavy metals tested except for zinc, than the crude fraction. This demonstrates that partial purification improves the sensitivity of the papain inhibitive assay towards heavy metals. https://www.biotech-asia.org/vol9no1/papain-partial-purification-improves-its-sensitivity-towards-heavy-metals-papain-partial-purification/ Papain; Partial purification; Heavy metals