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Updated: May 29, 2026

Static Adhesion Assay for the Study of Integrin Activation in T Lymphocytes
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Reconstruction of integrin activation

Feng Ye1, Chungho Kim, Mark H Ginsberg

  • 1Department of Medicine, University of California-San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.

Blood
|September 17, 2011
PubMed

Integrins are integral membrane proteins that mediate cell-matrix and cell-cell adhesion. They are important for vascular development and hematopoiesis, immune and inflammatory responses, and hemostasis. Integrins are also signaling receptors that can transmit information bidirectionally across plasma membranes. Research in the past 2 decades has made progress in unraveling the mechanisms of integrin signaling and brings the field to the moment of attempting synthetic reconstruction of the signaling pathways in vitro. Reconstruction of biologic processes provides stringent tests of our understanding of the process, as evidenced by studies of other biologic machines, such as ATP synthase, lactose permease, and G-protein-coupled receptors. Here, we review recent progress in reconstructing integrin signaling and the insights that we have gained through these experiments.

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