In vitro elucidation of substrate specificity and bioassay of proprotein convertase 4 using intramolecularly quenched fluorogenic peptides
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fourth member of Ca2+-dependent mammalian secretory subtilase, PC4 (proprotein convertase 4), is primarily expressed in testicular germ cell and ovarian macrophage. Its role in sperm fertilization and in early embryonic development has been demonstrated earlier through several studies, including those with PC4 null mice. A number of physiological substrates found in reproductive tissues have been postulated or identified for PC4 by various biochemical studies. These include growth factors IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor-1) and IGF-2, hormonal polypeptide proPACAP (where PACAP stands for pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide) and a number of surface proteins of ADAM (ADisintegrin And Metalloproteinase-like) family such as ADAM-1 (fertilin a), ADAM-2 (fertilin b), ADAM-3 (procyritestin) and ADAM-5. To provide further evidence in support of this notion and also to study the substrate specificity and bioassay of PC4, a series of intramolecularly quenched fluorogenic peptides containing the cleavage sites and several mutants were prepared. A comparative kinetic analysis and measurement of Vmax (app)/Km (app) ratio of these fluorogenic substrates against PC4 and PC7 revealed that the mutant variants of h (human) proPACAP and m (mouse) ADAM-5 derived peptides Q-PACAP141-151-mutant [Abz-141RVKNKGRRI150P151SY(NO2)-A-CONH2] (150A151Y replaced by PS) and Q-ADAM-5380-388-mutant [Abz-380E381PKPARRP388RY(NO2)A-CONH2] (381R replaced by P) are most efficiently and selectively cleaved by PC4. Using these two and Q-IGF-263-71 peptides, we showed that the sperm extract of normal adult mice is much higher when compared with that of PC4-null mice. This suggests that these fluorogenic peptides are useful for specific bioassay of PC4 activity. In addition, kinetic studies with various peptidyl-MCA indicate that the hexapeptide Ac-KTKQLR-MCA (where MCA stands for 4-methyl coumaryl-7-amide) is most efficiently and selectively cleaved by PC4 at RMCA, making it another effective agent for bioassay of PC4 activity. The study concludes that the most probable sequence motif for recognition by PC4 is KXKXXR or KXXR, where X is any amino acid other than cysteine and that it prefers proline at P3, P5 and/or P2' positions. It was also revealed that PC4 is a good candidate processing enzyme for growth factors IGF-1 and -2, neuropeptide proPACAP and several ADAM proteins such as ADAM-1, -2, -3 and -5.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".