LAUSR

BACKGROUND With the increasing prevalence of gout and its etiological hyperuricemia, dietary control on gout based on low-purine food according to patients' eating habits is becoming a better choice compared to the existing drug treatment like allopurinol with notorious side effects. Reconstructing the purine metabolic pathway in vitro to degrade purine substances in food into natural functional allantoin seems an innovative method to prepare nutritious and healthy low purine food. This study reported a computer-assisted in vitro reconstruction of four purinolytic enzymes metabolizing adenosine into allantoin to reduce purine content in food for personalized dietary control on hyperuricemia and gout. RESULTS Under the optimum reaction conditions of 40°C and pH 7, 0.1 U enzymes, and 0.5 mmol L-1 adenosine determined by orthogonal test design, 16 different enzyme complexes were experimentally tested. The tested enzyme composition and allantoin production values were used as input and output to build a 3-layer back propagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN) model, which was further optimized by genetic algorithm (GA). The optimum enzyme complex predicted by GA-BP-ANN model produced 248.08±7.832 μmol L-1 allantoin, which was 19.9% higher than equimolar mixture of enzymes, and also more efficiently lowered purine contents in beer, beef and yeast extract. CONCLUSION This is the first in vitro reconstitution of complete purine metabolic pathway by combining ANN and GA technologies with successful application in lowering purine content in food, indicating a promising application of computer-assisted in vitro reconstitution of purinolytic pathway in low-purine food to prevent hyperuricemia and gout. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.