Evolution of Caspase‐1 Inhibitors

Julia Pinheiro Chagas da Cunha, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research‐ São Paulo Branch, São Paulo‐SP, Brazil
Pedro Alexandre F Galante, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research‐ São Paulo Branch, São Paulo‐SP, Brazil
Sandro José de Souza, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research‐ São Paulo Branch, São Paulo‐SP, Brazil

Published online: December 2009

DOI: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0021743

CARD only protein 1 (COP1), inhibitory caspase recruitment domain (INCA) and ICEBERG are caspase recruitment domain (CARD)-only proteins that inhibit the activation of cysteine-dependent ASPartyl-specific proteASE (caspase)-1 or CASP-1. Although CASP-1 is widespread in vertebrates, CASP-1 inhibitors are exclusively found in primates. The most ancient CASP-1 inhibitor was found in the genome of a tree shrew, an ancestor of primates. The inhibitors are mapped in tandem at human chromosome 11 and their origin is directly and indirectly related to CASP-1 gene duplications. Different stop codons arose in the duplicated copies just upstream of the catalytic domain of CASP-1 generating CARD-only proteins. In this review we discuss the most recent findings regarding the evolution of both caspases and their inhibitors.

Key concepts

  • COP, INCA and ICEBERG are CASP-1 inhibitors.
  • COP, INCA and ICEBERG arose directly or indirectly from CASP-1 duplications.
  • Procaspase-1 contains a CARD and peptidase C14 domain, but the inhibitors contain only the CARD domain.
  • Stop codons upstream of the peptidase C14 domain where important for the generation of CASP-1 inhibitors.

Keywords: caspase-1; inhibitors; COP; INCA; ICEBERG; gene duplication

Figure 1. Schematic representation of genomic duplications generating CASP-1 inhibitors. ‘Ancient genomic’ represents the organization of genomic region before the duplication of CASP-1. Numbers represent chronological order of genomic duplications originating the CASP-1 inhibitors. ‘Current genomic’ represents the genomic organization of CASP-1 and its inhibitors found in the human genome sequence (hg18). Yellow rectangles represent the genomic transcribed region of CASP-1 inhibitors.
Figure 2. Exon/intron organization of CASP-1 and its inhibitors. (a) Representation of CASP-1 genomic region (coding exons) and a known CASP-1 transcript. (b) Representation of CASP-1 inhibitors genomic regions and their transcripts. Black rectangles represent the genomic regions homologous to known exons in the CASP-1 gene. ‘Known transcript’ represents a consensus transcript found for each one of genes.
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 Further Reading
    Degterev A and Yuan J (2008) Expansion and evolution of cell death programmes. Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 9: 378–390.
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    Oberst A, Bender C and Green DR (2008) Living with death: the evolution of the mitochondrial pathway of apoptosis in animals. Cell Death & Differentiation 15: 1139–1146.

Related Sub-Topics:

Molecular Evolution | Protein Evolution
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Article Title: Evolution of Caspase‐1 Inhibitors
 
How to Cite close
da Cunha, Julia Pinheiro Chagas, Galante, Pedro Alexandre F, and de Souza, Sandro José(Dec 2009) Evolution of Caspase‐1 Inhibitors. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0021743]