Welcome to the CaspBase – the Caspase Sequence Database
Caspases (cysteinyl aspartate-specific proteases) are an ancient class of enzymes that maintain cellular homeostasis by controlling the cell death program, apoptosis. They also are critical to cell development when activated at low levels.
Following gene duplication events, the caspase family evolved into three distinct subfamilies: the inflammatory caspases (casp-1, -4, -5), the apoptotic initiator caspases (casp-8, -10, -9, -2), and the apoptotic effector caspases (casp-3, -6, -7).
We assembled the CaspBase in order to provide access to a manually curated database of caspase sequences. The curated database contains 2,879 caspase sequences representing 32 caspase types from 10 phyla, 26 classes, and 353 species.
Users can search the database by highlighting individual species, phylum_class, or caspase type. The results can then be downloaded in fasta format.
If you are using CaspBase in your research, please cite :
Grinshpon, R. D., Williford, A., Titus‐McQuillan, J. and Clay Clark, A. (2018).
The CaspBase: a curated database for evolutionary biochemical studies of caspase
functional divergence and ancestral sequence inference. Protein Science, 27: 1857-1870. doi:10.1002/pro.3494