Four members of the tissue kallikrein family, mK1, mK9, mK13, and mK22, all of which exhibit extensive homology in amino acid sequence among themselves, were obtained from the submandibular gland of ICR mice and examined for their ability to cleave prorenin. Tissue kallikrein mK13 was confirmed to be a prorenin-converting enzyme; and mK9, which was earlier shown to be an EGF-binding protein, was found to cleave mouse Ren 2 prorenin specifically and convert it to mature renin with an activity of approximately 1/10 of that of mK13. With the same substrate, mK22 (beta-NGF endopeptidase) gave two products, renin and arginyl-renin; whereas mK1 (true tissue kallikrein) did not process it at all. The endoproteolytic activity of tissue kallikreins was examined with various peptide-MCA substrates. The substrates contained three key structures; X(Y)-Arg-Arg, X(Y)-Lys-Arg and X-Lys-Lys motifs (where X and Y are hydrophilic and hydrophobic amino acids, respectively). We found that mK1, mK9 and mK13 preferentially cleaved the former two types of substrate, except Y-Arg-Arg-MCA. The substrate X-Lys-Lys-MCA was hardly cleaved by these three tissue kallikreins but was preferentially cleaved by mK22. The four tissue kallikreins seem to have the ability to process precursor proteins containing a pair of basic amino acid residues; the specificities of three of the enzymes (mK1, mK9 and mK13) were similar to each other but were different from that of mK22.