alpha-chymotrypsin activity

traitmech:000159 · CLASS · PROPOSED

A physiological enzyme-activity phenotype in which a cell exhibits chymotrypsin-like serine endopeptidase activity, preferentially cleaving peptide bonds on the carboxyl side of tyrosine, tryptophan, phenylalanine, or leucine residues.

Trait evidence (2)

https://iubmb.qmul.ac.uk/enzyme/EC3/4/21/1.html
<b>Reaction:</b> Preferential cleavage: Tyr<img src="../../../EZgif/FISS.GIF" align=top>, Trp<img src="../../../EZgif/FISS.GIF" align=top>, Phe<img src="../../../EZgif/FISS.GIF" align=top>, Leu<img src="../../../EZgif/FISS.GIF" align=top>

The NC-IUBMB EC 3.4.21.1 entry accepts the name chymotrypsin and its reaction line places the scissile-bond FISS.GIF image immediately after Tyr, Trp, Phe, and Leu.
DOI:10.1099/ijsem.0.006017
enzymatic activities are present for: α-galactosidase, N-acetyl-β-glucosaminidase, arginine arylamidase, proline arylamidase, leucyl glycine arylamidase, phenylalanine arylamidase, leucine arylamidase, tyrosine arylamidase, alanine arylamidase, glycine arylamidase, histidine arylamidase, glutamyl glutamic acid arylamidase, serine arylamidase, valine arylamidase, cysteine arylamidase, esterase, esterase lipase, alpha-chymotrypsin

Srinivasan et al. listed alpha-chymotrypsin among enzymatic activities present in the Amygdalobacter indicium species description, consistent with the positive API ZYM table row for both assayed A. indicium strains.

Provenance

Identifier source: TraitMech local identifier
Definition source: https://iubmb.qmul.ac.uk/enzyme/EC3/4/21/1.html

Parent traits (1)

phenotype METPO:1000059

Synonyms (1)

alpha-chymotrypsin RELATED_SYNONYM · DOI:10.1099/ijsem.0.006017

kg-microbe context

No kg-microbe node embedding matched this record in the 2026-04-25 deepwalk.

Canonical examples (1)

Organisms cited as exemplars of this trait. Taxon ids are NCBITaxon and link out to the NCBI record.

Amygdalobacter indicium NCBITaxon:3029272 DOI:10.1099/ijsem.0.006017 Srinivasan et al. reported Amygdalobacter indicium as positive for alpha-chymotrypsin activity in the API ZYM enzyme activity panel.

Discussions and Knowledge Gaps (1)

Open questions attached to this trait. Seeded by just knowledge-gap-scan and curated; see the corpus-wide index.

Resolve an exact external ontology class for alpha-chymotrypsin activity before adding a TraitRecord xref.

CURATION TODO OPEN alpha-chymotrypsin-activity-xref-gap · raised by codex · 2026-09-12

Not yet attached to a section of this record — a curator sets attaches_to (e.g. causal_graphs#some_edge) so the gap shows beside the mechanism it concerns.

GO:0004263 chymotrypsin activity is obsolete, and its replacement GO:0004252 denotes broader serine-type endopeptidase molecular function rather than the organism-level chymotrypsin-like serine endopeptidase phenotype. GO:0004252 is appropriate as a causal-node grounding for generic serine-type endopeptidase activity, not as an equivalent TraitRecord xref.

Curation history

2026-09-12T05:29:03Z · MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID · codex
Minted alpha-chymotrypsin activity as a URL/DOI-backed TraitRecord after a repository-wide duplicate review covering ignored and hidden files; METPO has no exact alpha-chymotrypsin activity class yet.
2026-09-12T05:47:58Z · CORRECTED_EVIDENCE_SNIPPET · codex
Corrected the IUBMB reaction-line snippet for alpha-chymotrypsin activity so it preserves the scissile-bond image tags from the source HTML (#819).
2026-09-12T06:00:57Z · TIGHTENED_DEFINITION_WORDING · codex
Tightened the alpha-chymotrypsin activity definition to describe a chymotrypsin-like organismal phenotype instead of over-specifying production of the named vertebrate enzyme (#820).