Aspartic proteases are relatively a small group of proteolytic enzymes. Over the last decade, they have received tremendous research interest as potential targets for pharmaceutical intervention as many have been shown to play significant roles in physiological and pathological processes. Despite numerous efforts, however, the only inhibitors for aspartic proteases currently in the market are d...

World wide crop losses without the use of pesticides and other non-chemical control strategies is estimated to be about 70% of crop production, amounting to U.S. $ 400 billion. Many insect pest families are known which cause serious damage to agriculture crops. Insect pest menace is one of the major factors that destabilize crop productivity in agricultural ecosystems. They are responsible for ...

Sugarcane's (Saccharum spp.) response to Diatraea saccharalis (F.) (Lepidoptera: (Crambidae) herbivory was investigated using a macroarray spotted with 248 sugarcane Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) encoding serine peptidase inhibitors, serine peptidases. and Clp protease system subunits. Our results showed that after nine hours of herbivory, 13 sugarcane genes were upregulated and nine were down...

Although cytochrome P-450 monoxygenases mediate critical reactions in plant microsomes, characterization of their activities has been difficult due to their inherent instability and the lack of a crossreacting P-450 antibody. We have surveyed the effects of protein stabilizing agents on t-cinnamic acid hydroxylase (t-CAH), a prominent microsomal P-450, and on total P-450 monoxygenase content. T...

Citation: Kunert KJ and Pillay P (2015) Commentary: Extracellular peptidase hunting for improvement of protein production in plant cells and roots. Despite much recent success in plant-based protein production, key challenges, such as undesired plant proteolytic activities, still severely compromises current recombinant protein production with peptidases affecting protein stability (Pillay et a...