1. Impaired formation of homotypic cell-in-cell structures in human tumor cells lacking alpha-catenin expression.
- Author
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Wang, Manna, Ning, Xiangkai, Chen, Ang, Wang, Qiwei, Li, Shichong, Liu, Hong, Chen, Zhaolie, Huang, Hongyan, Ni, Chao, Zhou, Changxi, Wang, Xiaoning, Yu, Kaitao, Lan, Sanchun, Ma, Li, and Sun, Qiang
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CANCER cells , *CATENIN genetics , *GENE expression , *CELL adhesion , *CYTOLOGY , *CARRIER proteins - Abstract
Although cell-in-cell structures (CICs) could be detected in a wide range of human tumors, homotypic CICs formed between tumor cells occur at low rate for most of them. We recently reported that tumor cells lacking expression of E- and P-cadherin were incapable of forming homotypic CICs by entosis, and re-expression of E- or P-cadherin was sufficient to induce CICs formation in these tumor cells. In this work, we found that homotypic CICs formation was impaired in some tumor cells expressing high level of E-cadherin due to loss expression of alpha-catenin (α-catenin), a molecular linker between cadherin-mediated adherens junctions and F-actin. Expression of α-catenin in these tumor cells restored cell-cell adhesion and promoted CICs formation in a ROCK kinase-dependent way. Thus, our work identified α-catenin as another molecule in addition to E- and P-cadherin that were targeted to inactivate homotypic CICs formation in human tumor cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2015
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