Figure 1.

PC prodomains as PACE4 inhibitors. (a) PCs prodomains were produced and purified to perform inhibition assays toward PACE4 and furin. The ratio between K_i for furin and PACE4, namely the specificity ratio, point out the selectivity of PC7 prodomain toward PACE4. This inhibitor is a 36-fold better inhibitor for PACE4 than furin. K_is in the table are means and standard deviations of three independent experiments. (b) PCs prodomain sequence alignment was performed for the region P7–P1 downstream primary cleavage site. Dark background indicates conserved residues, while light-gray background indicates residues of same type than consensus. Bold letters represent hydrophobic residues. UniProtKB accession numbers are the following: hfurin (P09958), mPC1/3 (P63239), hPC2 (P16519), mPC4 (P2921), hPC5/6 (Q92824), hPC7 (Q16549), and hPACE4 (P29122).