Protease

A protease (also called a peptidase or proteinase) is any enzyme that performs proteolysis, that is, begins protein catabolism by hydrolysis of the peptide bonds that link amino acids together in a polypeptide chain. Proteases have evolved multiple times, and different classes of protease can perform the same reaction by completely different catalytic mechanisms. Proteases can be found in animals, plants, bacteria, archaea and viruses.

Classifications

Catalytic residue

Proteases can be classified into seven broad groups:

Proteases were first grouped into 84 families according to their evolutionary relationship in 1993, and classified under four catalytic types: serine, cysteine, aspartic, and metallo proteases. The threonine and glutamic-acid proteases were not described until 1995 and 2004 respectively. The mechanism used to cleave a peptide bond involves making an amino acid residue that has the cysteine and threonine (proteases) or a water molecule (aspartic acid, metallo- and glutamic acid proteases) nucleophilic so that it can attack the peptide carboxyl group. One way to make a nucleophile is by a catalytic triad, where a histidine residue is used to activate serine, cysteine, or threonine as a nucleophile. This is not an evolutionary grouping, however, as the nucleophile types have evolved convergently in different superfamilies, and some superfamilies show divergent evolution to multiple different nucleophiles.