The role of pro regions in protein folding.

In vivo, many proteases are synthesized as larger precursors. During the maturation process, the catalytically active protease domain is released from the larger polypeptide or pro-enzyme by one or more proteolytic processing steps. In several well studied cases, amino-terminal pro regions have been shown to play a fundamental role in the folding of the associated protease domains. The mechanism by which pro regions facilitate folding appears to be significantly different from that used by the molecular chaperones. Recent results suggest that the pro region assisted folding mechanism may be used by a wide variety of proteases, and perhaps even by non-proteases.