Cleavage of a tail-anchored protein by signal peptidase.

Tail-anchored proteins are post-translationally targeted and inserted into the endoplasmic reticulum membrane. They do not use the co-translational signal-recognition particle (SRP)-dependent pathway, but rather utilize an ill-defined, ATP-dependent mechanism. Here, we show that a tail-anchored protein can be cleaved by signal peptidase and that the sequence requirements for efficient cleavage seem to be the same as for cleavage of co-translationally targeted SRP-dependent proteins.