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Updated: Jul 7, 2026

Bead Aggregation Assays for the Characterization of Putative Cell Adhesion Molecules
Published on: October 17, 2014
The premetazoan ancestry of cadherins
1Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Center for Integrative Genomics, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
Abstract:
Cadherin-mediated cell adhesion and signaling is essential for metazoan development and yet is absent from all other multicellular organisms. We found cadherin genes at numbers similar to those observed in complex metazoans in one of the closest single-celled relatives of metazoans, the choanoflagellate Monosiga brevicollis. Because the evolution of metazoans from a single-celled ancestor required novel cell adhesion and signaling mechanisms, the discovery of diverse cadherins in choanoflagellates suggests that cadherins may have contributed to metazoan origins.
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