Abstract 2302 Examination of Fluorophores for Peptide Substrates used in Inflammatory Caspase Activity Assays

Inflammatory caspases are one of the two major groups of mammalian caspases and are vital to innate immune responses and cell death. These enzymes cleave after aspartic acid residues, and of the thirteen apoptotic and inflammatory caspases, humans only have three inflammatory caspases: caspase-1, caspase-4, and caspase-5. However, the lack of substrates selective for each caspase limits the understanding and identification of their roles and pathways. To identify when a substrate has been turned over by a specific caspase, each caspase requires a unique peptide sequence, quencher, and fluorophore (donor).