Prostate-specific antigen is a "chymotrypsin-like" serine protease with unique P1 substrate specificity.

ABSTRACT: Prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a serine protease belonging to the human kallikrein family, is best known as a prostate cancer biomarker. Emerging evidence suggests that PSA may also play a salient role in prostate cancer development and progression. With large amounts of enzymatically active PSA continuously and selectively produced by all stages of prostate cancer, PSA is an attractive target. PSA inhibitors, therefore, may represent a promising class of therapeutics and/or imaging agents. PSA displays chymotrypsin-like specificity, cleaving after hydrophobic residues, in addition to possessing a unique ability to cleave after glutamine in the P1 position. In this study, we investigated the structural motifs of the PSA S1 pocket that give it a distinct architecture and specificity when

SUBMITTER: LeBeau AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3341666 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature