背景资料：Sterile-20 (Ste20) is a serine/threonine kinase in Saccharomyces cerevisiae that is involved in relaying signals from G protein-coupled receptors to cyto-solic MAP kinase cascades. Mammalian protein kinases that display sequence similarity to Ste20 are divided into two groups, the PAK subfamily and the GCK subfamily. The mammalian Ste20-like kinases (MST kinases), also known as Krs proteins, are members of the GCK subfamily. Ksr-1 (MST-2) and Ksr-2 (MST-1) are both direct substrates of caspase-3 that accelerate caspase-3 activation.