Trypanosomatids rely on peptidases as potent virulence factors and were recently found to contain a unique set of natural peptidase inhibitors not found in higher eukaryotes or in yeast, but present in a limited number of bacteria. Chagasin, identified in Trypanosoma cruzi, is a tight-binding, high affinity inhibitor of papain-like cysteine peptidases that has an Ig-like fold and inactivates ta...

Characterization and evaluation of the activity of Vespa basalis DPP-IV, which expressed in Spodoptera frugiperda 21 cells. The expression of rDPP-IV was confirmed by SDS–PAGE, Western blot analyses, LC-MS/MS and measurement of its peptidase specificity. One-step purification by Ni-NTA affinity chromatography and the total amount of rDPP-IV recovered was approximately 6.4mg per liter from infec...

Dipeptidyl peptidase-like protein 6 (DPP6) is an auxiliary subunit of the Kv4 family of voltage-gated K(+) channels known to enhance channel surface expression and potently accelerate their kinetics. DPP6 is a single transmembrane protein, which is structurally remarkable for its large extracellular domain. Included in this domain is a cysteine-rich motif, the function of which is unknown. Here...

Chagas disease, caused by the unicellular parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, claims 50,000 lives annually and is the leading cause of infectious myocarditis in the world. As current antichagastic therapies like nifurtimox and benznidazole are highly toxic, ineffective at parasite eradication, and subject to increasing resistance, novel therapeutics are urgently needed. Cruzain, the major cysteine prot...

Metacaspases, cysteine proteases belonging to the peptidase C14 family, are suspected of being involved in the programmed cell death of plants, although their sequences and substrate specificity differ from those of animal caspases. At present, the knowledge on the metacaspase reaction mechanism is based only on biochemical data and homology models constructed on caspase templates. Here we prop...