CASP8

This gene encodes a member of the cysteine-aspartic acid protease (caspase) family. Sequential activation of caspases plays a central role in the execution-phase of cell apoptosis. Caspases exist as inactive proenzymes composed of a prodomain, a large protease subunit, and a small protease subunit. Activation of caspases requires proteolytic processing at conserved internal aspartic residues to generate a heterodimeric enzyme consisting of the large and small subunits. This protein is involved in the programmed cell death induced by Fas and various apoptotic stimuli. The N-terminal FADD-like death effector domain of this protein suggests that it may interact with Fas-interacting protein FADD. This protein was detected in the insoluble fraction of the affected brain region from Huntington disease patients but not in those from normal controls, which implicated the role in neurodegenerative diseases. Many alternatively spliced transcript variants encoding different isoforms have been described, although not all variants have had their full-length sequences determined. [provided by RefSeq, Jul 2008]

Description

Caspase 8

Tissue specificity

Tissue enhanced (bone marrow)

Subcell location

Nucleoplasm, Cytosol

Predicted location

Intracellular

Protein family

Cancer-related genes
Disease related genes
Enzymes
Human disease related genes
Mapped to neXtProt
Mapped to UniProt SWISS-PROT
Potential drug targets
Predicted intracellular proteins
Protein evidence (Ezkurdia et al 2014)
Protein evidence (Kim et al 2014)

Chromosome

2 (201233443 - 201287711)

Ensembl ID

ENSG00000064012  (ver. 103.38)

Orthologs

Mouse Casp8: ENSMUSG00000026029

UniProt

Q14790

neXtProt

NX_Q14790

Human splice variants
Mouse splice variants

Protein structure