DECAY, a Novel Drosophila Caspase Related to Mammalian Caspase-3 and Caspase-7*
- From the ‡Hanson Centre for Cancer Research, Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science, Frome Road, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia and the Departments of ‖Genetics and§Medicine, the University of Adelaide, Adelaide SA 5001, Australia
Abstract
Caspases are key effectors of programmed cell death in metazoans. In Drosophila, four caspases have been described so far. Here we describe the identification and characterization of the fifth Drosophila caspase, DECAY. DECAY shares a high degree of homology with the members of the mammalian caspase-3 subfamily, particularly caspase-3 and caspase-7. DECAY lacks a long prodomain and thus appears to be a class II effector caspase. Ectopic expression of DECAY in cultured cells induces apoptosis. Recombinant DECAY exhibited substrate specificity similar to the mammalian caspase-3 subfamily. Low levels of decaymRNA are ubiquitously expressed in Drosophila embryos during early stages of development but its expression becomes somewhat spatially restricted in some tissues. During oogenesisdecay mRNA was detected in egg chambers of all stages consistent with a role for DECAY in apoptosis of nurse cells. Relatively high levels of decay mRNA are expressed in larval salivary glands and midgut, two tissues which undergo histolysis during larval/pupal metamorphosis, suggesting that DECAY may play a role in developmentally programmed cell death inDrosophila.
Footnotes
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↵* This work was supported in part by grants from the Wellcome Trust and Australian Research Council.The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. The article must therefore be hereby marked “advertisement” in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.
The nucleotide sequence(s) reported in this paper has been submitted to the GenBank™/EMBL Data Bank with accession number(s) .
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↵¶ Supported by a Commonwealth Postgraduate Award.
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↵** Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in Medical Science.
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↵‡ To whom correspondence should be addressed: The Hanson Centre for Cancer Research, Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science, P.O. Box 14, Rundle Mall, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia. Tel.: 61-8-8222-3738; Fax: 61-8-8222-3139; E-mail: sharad.kumar@imvs.sa.gov.au.
- Abbreviations:
- CHAPS
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3-[(3-cholamidopropyl)dimethylammonio]-1-propanesulfonic acid
- PARP
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poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase
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- Received July 1, 1999.
- Revision received July 26, 1999.
- The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.
