Impaired formation of homotypic cell-in-cell structures in human tumor cells lacking alpha-catenin expression.

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.

• Authors: Manna Wang, Xiangkai Ning, Ang Chen, Hongyan Huang, Chao Ni, Changxi Zhou, Kaitao Yu, Sanchun Lan, Qiwei Wang, Shichong Li, Hong Liu, Xiaoning Wang, Zhaolie Chen, Li Ma, Qiang Sun
• Journal: Scientific reports (Sci Rep) Vol. 5 Pg. 12223 (Jul 20 2015) ISSN: 2045-2322 [Electronic] England
• PMID: 26192076 (Publication Type: Journal Article, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't)

Chemical References

• Actins
• alpha Catenin

Topics

• Actins (metabolism)
• Adherens Junctions (metabolism)
• Cell Adhesion
• Cell Line, Tumor
• Cytoskeleton (metabolism)
• Humans
• alpha Catenin (metabolism)