
thumb|right|Space-filling model of elastase thumb|200px|Crystals of porcine elastase
thumb|right|Space-filling model of elastase thumb|200px|Crystals of porcine elastase
In molecular biology, elastase is an enzyme from the class of proteases (peptidases) that break down proteins, specifically one that can break down elastin. In other words, the name only refers to the substrate specificity (i.e. what proteins it can digest), not to any kind of evolutionary grouping.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).