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Updated: May 27, 2026

Bead Aggregation Assays for the Characterization of Putative Cell Adhesion Molecules
Published on: October 17, 2014
E-N-cadherin heterodimers define novel adherens junctions connecting endoderm-derived cells
Beate K Straub1, Steffen Rickelt, Ralf Zimbelmann
1Helmholtz Group for Cell Biology, German Cancer Research Center, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany.
Abstract:
Intercellular junctions play a pivotal role in tissue development and function and also in tumorigenesis. In epithelial cells, decrease or loss of E-cadherin, the hallmark molecule of adherens junctions (AJs), and increase of N-cadherin are widely thought to promote carcinoma progression and metastasis. In this paper, we show that this "cadherin switch" hypothesis does not hold for diverse endoderm-derived cells and cells of tumors derived from them. We show that the cadherins in a major portion of AJs in these cells can be chemically cross-linked in E-N heterodimers. We also show that cells possessing E-N heterodimer AJs can form semistable hemihomotypic AJs with purely N-cadherin-based AJs of mesenchymally derived cells, including stroma cells. We conclude that these heterodimers are the major AJ constituents of several endoderm-derived tissues and tumors and that the prevailing concept of antagonistic roles of these two cadherins in developmental and tumor biology has to be reconsidered.
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