Also known as peptidolysis, GO:0006508
thumb|300px|The hydrolysis of a [[protein (red) by the nucleophilic attack of water (blue). The uncatalysed half-life is several hundred years.]]
via PubMed
thumb|300px|The hydrolysis of a [[protein (red) by the nucleophilic attack of water (blue). The uncatalysed half-life is several hundred years.]]
Proteolysis is the breakdown of proteins into smaller polypeptides or amino acids. Protein degradation is a major regulatory mechanism of gene expression and contributes substantially to shaping mammalian proteomes. Uncatalysed, the hydrolysis of peptide bonds is extremely slow, taking hundreds of years. Proteolysis is typically catalysed by cellular enzymes called proteases, but may also occur by intra-molecular digestion.
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Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).