Technical Support FAQ

We have never made a direct comparison to Godo Shusei. The following reference/link
http://www.jmicro.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/41/2/70.pdf
made a practical comparison of Roche units of dispase II with those cited in the Japanese literature (where concentrations of 1,000 to 2,000 units dispase are not uncommon). They suggest one Roche unit equals approx. 600 Japanese units dispase.

The Roche unit definition looks similiar to the Worthington unit however, we have assayed several lots of Roche Dipase II with activities reported near 1.0 u/mg and only recover ~0.4-0.6 u/mg DW at WBC using our assay conditions. I would therefore estimate one of our units is similar to ~ 1,200 Japanese units. We don't have a direct comparison with the Japanese only references

The Worthington unit definition is similiar to Roche the differences we see are probably due to the casein used(natural substrate) and other assay conditions. Most of the US suppliers use a casein lysing method where we measure production of 1 umol tyrosine/min.