3 Drosophila Cell Adhesion Molecules

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter describes Drosophila cell adhesion molecules. The primary reason for the interest in Drosophila cell adhesion proteins is the ability to undertake sophisticated genetic analyses of function in situ. Analysis in situ is especially important when examining the function during development, where cell culture systems are of limited value. Drosophila has become a major experimental system for understanding the fundamental mechanisms of pattern formation and development. Cells transformed with wild-type or altered genes for adhesion proteins have been instrumental in dissecting the molecular and cell biology of vertebrate adhesion and similar approaches are available to the Drosophila biologist. Typically, these studies utilize the S2 Drosophila cell line that normally grows as round, nonadhering cells. One of the lessons emerging from mushrooming molecular anatomy database is that all metazoans are composed of similar proteins or at least the proteins generated from the combinations of similar domains. Cell adhesion proteins are no exception to this generalization. In some proteins, such as the integrin β subunit, nearly all the functional domains appear to be identical with those of the vertebrate homologs.