Cadherin and integrin regulation of epithelial cell migration.

Jonathan Silvestre, Paul J A Kenis, Deborah E Leckband

Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.

Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids 2009 Sep 1

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These studies quantified the relative effects of E-cadherin expression and homophilic ligation on the integrin-mediated motility of epithelial cells. Micropatterned proteins were used to quantitatively titrate the ligation of E-cadherin and integrin receptors in order to assess their coordinate influence on the migration velocities of MDA-MB-231 breast tumor epithelial cells. Fibronectin, E-cadherin, and mixtures of fibronectin and E-cadherin were covalently patterned on solid surfaces at defined compositions and mass coverages. The migration velocities of parental epithelial cells and of cells engineered to express E-cadherin under tetracycline control show that E-cadherin expression reduces cell motility by both adhesion-dependent and adhesion-independent mechanisms. Increasing E-cadherin expression levels also suppresses the dependence of cell velocity on the fibronectin coverage. On E-cadherin-containing substrata, the cell velocity decreases both with the E-cadherin expression level and with the immobilized E-cadherin surface density. These studies thus identified conditions under which E-cadherin preferentially suppresses cell migration by adhesion-independent versus adhesion-dependent mechanisms.

Citation

Jonathan Silvestre, Paul J A Kenis, Deborah E Leckband. Cadherin and integrin regulation of epithelial cell migration. Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids. 2009 Sep 1;25(17):10092-9