Elaine Tsang:

Caspases are proteases that cause apoptosis and inflammation. They are in the family of proteases that act in a cascade fashion to activiate downstream caspases responsible for cleavage of major cellular substrates necessary for normal functioning of cells. My project in the Dorrestein Lab focused on the apoptosis-related caspase-3, aiming to synthesize a tetrapeptide that specifically inhibits the activity of caspase-3. It is considered to be an important target for therapeutic agents as the activation of caspase-3 is a key signal for the final execution of cell-death. The ultimate goal for this project to spatially localize proteases using MALDI imaging, and caspase-3 is the prototypical caspase that we will use as a proof of principle.