Dataset Information

GraBCas: a bioinformatics tool for score-based prediction of Caspase- and Granzyme B-cleavage sites in protein sequences.

ABSTRACT: Caspases and granzyme B are proteases that share the primary specificity to cleave at the carboxyl terminal of aspartate residues in their substrates. Both, caspases and granzyme B are enzymes that are involved in fundamental cellular processes and play a central role in apoptotic cell death. Although various targets are described, many substrates still await identification and many cleavage sites of known substrates are not identified or experimentally verified. A more comprehensive knowledge of caspase and granzyme B substrates is essential to understand the biological roles of these enzymes in more detail. The relatively high variability in cleavage site recognition sequence often complicates the identification of cleavage sites. As of yet there is no software available that allows identification of caspase and/or granzyme with cleavage sites differing from the consensus sequence. Here, we present a bioinformatics tool 'GraBCas' that provides score-based prediction of potential cleavage sites for the caspases 1-9 and granzyme B including an estimation of the fragment size. We tested GraBCas on already known substrates and showed its usefulness for protein sequence analysis. GraBCas is available at http://wwwalt.med-rz.uniklinik-saarland.de/med_fak/humangenetik/software/index.html.

SUBMITTER: Backes C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1160194 | biostudies-literature | 2005 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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GraBCas: a bioinformatics tool for score-based prediction of Caspase- and Granzyme B-cleavage sites in protein sequences.

Backes Christina C Kuentzer Jan J Lenhof Hans-Peter HP Comtesse Nicole N Meese Eckart E

Nucleic acids research 20050701 Web Server issue

Caspases and granzyme B are proteases that share the primary specificity to cleave at the carboxyl terminal of aspartate residues in their substrates. Both, caspases and granzyme B are enzymes that are involved in fundamental cellular processes and play a central role in apoptotic cell death. Although various targets are described, many substrates still await identification and many cleavage sites of known substrates are not identified or experimentally verified. A more comprehensive knowledge o ...[more]

PMID: 15980455

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Project description:BackgroundCaspases are a family of proteases that have central functions in programmed cell death (apoptosis) and inflammation. Caspases mediate their effects through aspartate-specific cleavage of their target proteins, and at present almost 400 caspase substrates are known. There are several methods developed to predict caspase cleavage sites from individual proteins, but currently none of them can be used to predict caspase cleavage sites from multiple proteins or entire proteomes, or to use several classifiers in combination. The possibility to create a database from predicted caspase cleavage products for the whole genome could significantly aid in identifying novel caspase targets from tandem mass spectrometry based proteomic experiments.ResultsThree different pattern recognition classifiers were developed for predicting caspase cleavage sites from protein sequences. Evaluation of the classifiers with quality measures indicated that all of the three classifiers performed well in predicting caspase cleavage sites, and when combining different classifiers the accuracy increased further. A new tool, Pripper, was developed to utilize the classifiers and predict the caspase cut sites from an arbitrary number of input sequences. A database was constructed with the developed tool, and it was used to identify caspase target proteins from tandem mass spectrometry data from two different proteomic experiments. Both known caspase cleavage products as well as novel cleavage products were identified using the database demonstrating the usefulness of the tool. Pripper is not restricted to predicting only caspase cut sites, but it gives the possibility to scan protein sequences for any given motif(s) and predict cut sites once a suitable cut site prediction model for any other protease has been developed. Pripper is freely available and can be downloaded from http://users.utu.fi/mijopi/Pripper.ConclusionsWe have developed Pripper, a tool for reading an arbitrary number of proteins in FASTA format, predicting their caspase cleavage sites and outputting the cleaved sequences to a new FASTA format sequence file. We show that Pripper is a valuable tool in identifying novel caspase target proteins from modern proteomics experiments.

Dataset Information

GraBCas: a bioinformatics tool for score-based prediction of Caspase- and Granzyme B-cleavage sites in protein sequences.

Publications

GraBCas: a bioinformatics tool for score-based prediction of Caspase- and Granzyme B-cleavage sites in protein sequences.

Similar Datasets

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