Serpins are a highly conserved superfamily of serine and papain-like cysteine proteinase inhibitors that are divided phylogenetically into clades. Serpins also can be divided anatomically into those that reside predominately outside or inside cells. While the activities of the extracellular serpins are well understood, the biological functions, as well as the overall distribution of the intrace...

Proprotein convertases (PCs) are an important class of host-cell serine endoproteases implicated in many physiological and pathological processes. Owing to their expanding roles in the proteolytic events required for generating infectious microbial pathogens and for tumor growth and invasiveness, there is increasing interest in identifying endogenous PC inhibitors. Here we report the identifica...

Introduction Alpha1-antitrypsin is a member of the serpin (serine protease inhibitor) family of proteins . It controls the breakdown of elastic tissue in the lung by inhibiting human neutrophil elastase. It does so by the remarkable serpin mechanism forming a covalent complex with the enzyme and undergoing a dramatic, stabilising conformational change in order to fully disable it . However this...

Protease nexin-1 (PN-1) belongs to the serpin family and is an inhibitor of thrombin, plasmin, urokinase-type plasminogen activator, and matriptase. Recent studies have suggested PN-1 to play important roles in vascular-, neuro-, and tumour-biology. The serpin inhibitory mechanism consists of the serpin presenting its so-called reactive centre loop as a substrate to its target protease, resulti...

A balance between proteolytic activity and protease inhibition is crucial to the appropriate function of many biological processes. There is mounting evidence for the presence of both papain-like cysteine proteases and serpins with a corresponding inhibitory activity in the nucleus. Well characterized examples of cofactors fine tuning serpin activity in the extracellular milieu are known, but s...

Human cytoplasmic antiproteinase (CAP) is an intracellular serpin that has been reported to utilize Arg341 as the reactive site P1 residue to neutralize a broad variety of extracellular serine proteases with trypsin-like specificity. Both native CAP and recombinant CAP purified from Escherichia coli were observed to form SDS-stable complexes not only with 125I-thrombin and 125I-urokinase, but a...

Serpins form an enormous superfamily of 40-60-kDa proteins found in almost all types of organisms, including humans. Most are one-use suicide substrate serine and cysteine proteinase inhibitors that have evolved to finely regulate complex proteolytic pathways, such as blood coagulation, fibrinolysis, and inflammation. Despite distinct functions for each serpin, there is much redundancy in the p...