Summary

Caspase domain

No Pfam abstract.

Literature references

Wilson KP, Black JA, Thomson JA, Kim EE, Griffith JP, Navia MA, Murcko MA, Chambers SP, Aldape RA, Raybuck SA, et al , Nature 1994;370:270-275.: Structure and mechanism of interleukin-1 beta converting enzyme. PUBMED:8035875

InterPro entry IPR011600

In the MEROPS database peptidases and peptidase homologues are grouped into clans and families. Clans are groups of families for which there is evidence of common ancestry based on a common structural fold:

Each clan is identified with two letters, the first representing the catalytic type of the families included in the clan (with the letter 'P' being used for a clan containing families of more than one of the catalytic types serine, threonine and cysteine). Some families cannot yet be assigned to clans, and when a formal assignment is required, such a family is described as belonging to clan A-, C-, M-, S-, T- or U-, according to the catalytic type. Some clans are divided into subclans because there is evidence of a very ancient divergence within the clan, for example MA(E), the gluzincins, and MA(M), the metzincins.
Peptidase families are grouped by their catalytic type, the first character representing the catalytic type: A, aspartic; C, cysteine; G, glutamic acid; M, metallo; S, serine; T, threonine; and U, unknown. The serine, threonine and cysteine peptidases utilise the amino acid as a nucleophile and form an acyl intermediate - these peptidases can also readily act as transferases. In the case of aspartic, glutamic and metallopeptidases, the nucleophile is an activated water molecule.

In many instances the structural protein fold that characterises the clan or family may have lost its catalytic activity, yet retain its function in protein recognition and binding.

Cysteine peptidases have characteristic molecular topologies, which can be seen not only in their three-dimensional structures, but commonly also in the two-dimensional structures. These are peptidases in which the nucleophile is the sulphydryl group of a cysteine residue. Cysteine proteases are divided into clans (proteins which are evolutionary related), and further sub-divided into families, on the basis of the architecture of their catalytic dyad or triad PUBMED:11517925.

This group of sequences represent the p20 (20kDa) and p10 (10kDa) subunits of caspases, which together form the catalytic domain of the caspase and are derived from the p45 (45 kDa) precursor () PUBMED:15226512.

Caspases (Cysteine-dependent ASPartyl-specific proteASE) are cysteine peptidases that belong to the MEROPS peptidase family C14 (caspase family, clan CD) based on the architecture of their catalytic dyad or triad PUBMED:11517925. Caspases are tightly regulated proteins that require zymogen activation to become active, and once active can be regulated by caspase inhibitors. Activated caspases act as cysteine proteases, using the sulphydryl group of a cysteine side chain for catalysing peptide bond cleavage at aspartyl residues in their substrates. The catalytic cysteine and histidine residues are on the p20 subunit after cleavage of the p45 precursor.

Caspases are mainly involved in mediating cell death (apoptosis) PUBMED:10578171, PUBMED:10872455, PUBMED:15077141. They have two main roles within the apoptosis cascade: as initiators that trigger the cell death process, and as effectors of the process itself. Caspase-mediated apoptosis follows two main pathways, one extrinsic and the other intrinsic or mitochondrial-mediated. The extrinsic pathway involves the stimulation of various TNF (tumour necrosis factor) cell surface receptors on cells targeted to die by various TNF cytokines that are produced by cells such as cytotoxic T cells. The activated receptor transmits the signal to the cytoplasm by recruiting FADD, which forms a death-inducing signalling complex (DISC) with caspase-8. The subsequent activation of caspase-8 initiates the apoptosis cascade involving caspases 3, 4, 6, 7, 9 and 10. The intrinsic pathway arises from signals that originate within the cell as a consequence of cellular stress or DNA damage. The stimulation or inhibition of different Bcl-2 family receptors results in the leakage of cytochrome c from the mitochondria, and the formation of an apoptosome composed of cytochrome c, Apaf1 and caspase-9. The subsequent activation of caspase-9 initiates the apoptosis cascade involving caspases 3 and 7, among others. At the end of the cascade, caspases act on a variety of signal transduction proteins, cytoskeletal and nuclear proteins, chromatin-modifying proteins, DNA repair proteins and endonucleases that destroy the cell by disintegrating its contents, including its DNA. The different caspases have different domain architectures depending upon where they fit into the apoptosis cascades, however they all carry the catalytic p10 and p20 subunits.

Caspases can have roles other than in apoptosis, such as caspase-1 (interleukin-1 beta convertase) (), which is involved in the inflammatory process. The activation of apoptosis can sometimes lead to caspase-1 activation, providing a link between apoptosis and inflammation, such as during the targeting of infected cells. Caspases may also be involved in cell differentiation PUBMED:15066636.

Clan

This family is a member of clan Peptidase_CD (CL0093), which contains the following 6 members:

Peptidase_C11 Peptidase_C13 Peptidase_C14 Peptidase_C25 Peptidase_C50 Peptidase_C80

Gene Ontology

Molecular function	cysteine-type endopeptidase activity (GO:0004197)
Biological process	proteolysis (GO:0006508)

External database links

HOMSTRAD:	CASc
MEROPS:	C14
PANDIT:	PF00656
PROSITE:	PDOC00864
PROSITE profile:	PS50208
SCOP:	1ice
SYSTERS:	Peptidase_C14

Domain organisation

Below is a listing of the unique domain organisations or architectures in which this domain is found. More...

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Alignments

There are various ways to view or download the sequence alignments that we store. You can use a sequence viewer to look at either the seed or full alignment for the family, or you can look at a plain text version of the sequence in a variety of different formats. More...

View options

Alignment:	Seed (118) Full (1689) NCBI (2951) Metagenomics (695)
Viewer:

Formatting options

Alignment:	Seed (118) Full (1689)
Format:
Order:	Tree Alphabetical
Sequence:	Inserts lower case All upper case
Gaps:
Download/view:	Download View

Download options

Very large alignments can often cause problems for the formatting tool above. If you find that downloading or viewing a large alignment is problematic, you can also download a gzip-compressed, Stockholm-format file containing the seed or full alignment for this family.

You can also download a FASTA format file containing the full-length sequences for all sequences in the full alignment.

The main seed and full alignments are generated using sequences from the UniProt sequence database. However, we also generate alignments using sequences from the NCBI sequence database and the "metaseq" metagenomics dataset.

You can view alignments from these two additional datasets using the form above, or you can download alignments of NCBI or metagenomics sequences, as gzip-compressed files.

Pfam alignments:	Seed (118) Full (1689) NCBI (2951) Metagenomics (695)
Full length sequences	Full-sequences (1689)

External links

MyHits provides a collection of tools to handle multiple sequence alignments. For example, one can refine a seed alignment (sequence addition or removal, re-alignment or manual edition) and then search databases for remote homologs using HMMER2.

HMM logo

HMM logos is one way of visualising profile HMMs. Logos provide a quick overview of the properties of an HMM in a graphical form. You can see a more detailed description of HMM logos and find out how you can interpret them here. More...

Trees

This page displays the phylogenetic tree for this family. We use FastTree to calculate neighbour join trees with a local bootstrap based on 100 resamples (shown next to the tree nodes). FastTree calculates approximately-maximum-likelihood phylogenetic trees from our seed or full alignments.

Note: You can also download the data files for the seed, full, NCBI or metagenomics trees.

Curation and family details

This section shows the detailed information about the Pfam family. You can see the definitions of many of the terms in this section in the glossary and a fuller explanation of the scoring system that we use in the scores section of the help pages.

Curation

Seed source:

Bateman A & Pfam-B_2524 (Release 8.0)

Previous IDs:

ICE_p20;

Type:

Domain

Author:

Bateman A

Number in seed:

118

Number in full:

1689

Average length of the domain:

232.80 aa

Average identity of full alignment:

16 %

Average coverage of the sequence by the domain:

44.78 %

HMM information

HMM build commands:

build method: hmmbuild -o /dev/null HMM SEED

search method: hmmsearch -Z 9421015 -E 1000 HMM pfamseq

Model details:

Parameter	Sequence	Domain
Gathering cut-off	21.4	21.4
Trusted cut-off	21.4	21.4
Noise cut-off	21.1	21.3

Model length:

243

Family (HMM) version:

15

Download:

download the raw HMM for this family

Species distribution

Tree controls

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The tree shows the occurrence of this domain across different species. More...

Species trees

We show the species tree in one of two ways. For smaller trees we try to show an interactive representation, which allows you to select specific nodes in the tree and view them as an alignment or as a set of Pfam domain graphics.

Unfortunately we have found that there are problems viewing the interactive tree when the it becomes larger than a certain limit. Furthermore, we have found that Internet Explorer can become unresponsive when viewing some trees, regardless of their size. We therefore show a text representation of the species tree when the size is above a certain limit or if you are using Internet Explorer to view the site.

If you are using IE you can still load the interactive tree by clicking the "Generate interactive tree" button, but please be aware of the potential problems that the interactive species tree can cause.

Interactive tree

For all of the domain matches in a full alignment, we count the number that are found on all sequences in the alignment. This total is shown in the purple box.

We also count the number of unique sequences on which each domain is found, which is shown in green. Note that a domain may appear multiple times on the same sequence, leading to the difference between these two numbers.

Finally, we group sequences from the same organism according to the NCBI code that is assigned by UniProt, allowing us to count the number of distinct sequences on which the domain is found. This value is shown in the pink boxes.

We use the NCBI species tree to group organisms according to their taxonomy and this forms the structure of the displayed tree. Note that in some cases the trees are too large (have too many nodes) to allow us to build an interactive tree, but in most cases you can still view the tree in a plain text, non-interactive representation. Those species which are represented in the seed alignment for this domain are highlighted.

You can use the tree controls to manipulate how the interactive tree is displayed:

show/hide the summary boxes
highlight species that are represented in the seed alignment
expand/collapse the tree or expand it to a given depth
select a sub-tree or a set of species within the tree and view them graphically or as an alignment
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Interactions

There are 2 interactions for this family. More...

Peptidase_C14 BIR

Structures

For those sequences which have a structure in the Protein DataBank, we use the mapping between UniProt, PDB and Pfam coordinate systems from the MSD group, to allow us to map Pfam domains onto UniProt sequences and three-dimensional protein structures. The table below shows the structures on which the Peptidase_C14 domain has been found.

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Family: Peptidase_C14 (PF00656)

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