Cadherin Subclasses: Differential Expression and Their Roles in Neural Morphogenesis

Excerpt

Cells are able to adhere selectively to particular cell types. This property of cells is considered to play an important role in development of the nervous system. For example, the selective adhesiveness might be essential for developing neurons to seek and bind to the particular target cells, or it might work for sorting different types of neurons and glias to establish the highly ordered stereotypic cell arrangement in neural tissues during development. In fact, it is known that disaggregated neural cells can reconstitute the original tissue-like structures when reaggregated by allocating themselves in a tissue-specific pattern (Fujisawa 1971). It is likely that such cell behaviors are regulated at least partly by the molecules involved in cell-cell adhesion, although many other factors, such as cell-matrix adhesion molecules, cell migration activators or inhibitors, chemotactic factors, and growth factors, might also be involved (Dodd and Jessel 1988).

Many classes of cell surface molecules...