A protease (also called a peptidase or proteinase) is an enzyme that catalyses (increases the rate of) proteolysis, the breakdown of proteins into smaller polypeptides or single amino acids. They do this by cleaving the peptide bonds within proteins by hydrolysis, a reaction where water breaks bonds. Proteases are involved in many biological functions, including digestion of ingested proteins, protein catabolism (breakdown of old proteins), and cell signalling. Without additional helping mechanisms, proteolysis would be very slow, taking hundreds of years. Proteases can be found in all forms of life and viruses. They have independently evolved multiple times, and different classes of protease can perform the same reaction by completely different catalytic mechanisms. Proteases are involved in digesting long protein chains into shorter fragments by splitting the peptide bonds that link amino acid residues. Some detach the terminal amino acids from the protein chain (exopeptidases, such as aminopeptidases, carboxypeptidase A); others attack internal peptide bonds of a protein (endopeptidases, such as trypsin, chymotrypsin, pepsin, papain, elastase). The mechanism used to cleave a peptide bond involves making an amino acid residue that has the cysteine and threonine (proteases) or a water molecule (aspartic acid, metallo- and acid proteases) nucleophilic so that it can attack the peptide carboxyl group. One way to make a nucleophile is by a catalytic triad, where a histidine residue is used to activate serine, cysteine, or threonine as a nucleophile. Proteases occur in all organisms, from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to viruses. These enzymes are involved in a multitude of physiological reactions from simple digestion of food proteins to highly regulated cascades