Different evolutionary strategies for the origin of caspase-1 inhibitors.

Caspase 1 (CASP-1) inhibitors share sequence similarity to CASP-1 itself and are all mapped to chr11q22.3. Here we show that these inhibitors are all products of a series of gene duplications that occurred at this locus after the divergence between human and mouse. Surprisingly, stop codons originated independently in all duplicated copies to generate CARD-only proteins with inhibitory activity. We discuss this evolutionary model in the context of both neo- and subfunctionalization.

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Júlia P C da Cunha, Pedro A F Galante, Sandro J de Souza. Different evolutionary strategies for the origin of caspase-1 inhibitors. Journal of molecular evolution. 2008 Jun;66(6):591-7

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PMID: 18473111

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