Introduction

Caspases (for cysteine aspartate proteases) belong to a family of cysteine proteases that serve as important effectors of apoptosis and inflammation. These proteases are unique among mammalian proteases as they cleave substrates after an aspartate residue at sites bearing signature tetrapeptide motifs. A decade of research on caspases has brought about a wealth of data as well as prompting recent investigation into their role as therapeutic targets in diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

We have developed Casbase- an online relational database containing an array of biological data on caspases and their substrates. We have compiled two distinct sets of entries for caspases and their substrates from publicly available databases and published literature. Entries are annotated with links to other databases (e.g. Uniprot, PubMed, Interpro, PDB) as well as proprietary data such as substrate cleavage sites and cleavage consequences.

(Hengartner, 2000)

Database Usage

Casbase contains data for both caspases and their substrates. Entries can be queried using keywords, accession numbers and sequence similarity (BLAST). Substrates entries can also be browsed under their respective functional categories.

Query database for caspases
Query database for caspases substrates

The entire set of caspases and substrates entries are available as Fasta-formatted sequence files for download.

Some statistics on the database are available here.

Help

Please read this help section regarding the use of the database.

Future Development

As new caspase substrates are being discovered, we intend to extract the relevant data from the primary databases and published literature periodically (every 6 months) and deposit them into Casbase. A computational tool for predicting caspase substrate cleavage sites and a Java-based module for visualizing substrate cleavage sites are currently in the development pipeline.

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. For further enquries, please contact lawrence@bic.nus.edu.sg