Heparan sulfate and heparin, two sulfated glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), extracted collagen-tailed acetylcholinesterase (AChE) from the extracellular matrix (ECM) of the electric organ of Discopyge tschudii. The effect of heparan sulfate and heparin was abolished by protamine; other GAGs could not extract the esterase. The solubilization of the asymmetric AChE apparently occurs through the formatio...

Skeletal muscle fibers are surrounded by an extracellular matrix. The extracellular matrix is composed of gly cop rote ins, collagen, and pro teogly cans. Proteoglycans have been suggested by different reports to play an important functional role in tissue differentiation. However, an understanding of how protcoglycans modulate skeletal muscle differentiation and the activation of myogenic sate...

Patients with protein-losing enteropathy (PLE) fail to maintain intestinal epithelial barrier function and develop an excessive and potentially fatal efflux of plasma proteins. PLE occurs in ostensibly unrelated diseases, but emerging commonalities in clinical observations recently led us to identify key players in PLE pathogenesis. These include elevated IFN-gamma, TNF-alpha, venous hypertensi...

lthough the cellular adhesion molecule CD44 is involved in processes ranging from lymphocyte homing to tumor metastasis, it has remained unclear how CD44 transduces the intracellular signals required for such a broad range of activities. On page 755, Okamoto et al. propose a surprising mechanism for CD44 signal transduction: a cytoplasmic domain is cleaved from the protein, after which it trans...

Studies of the involvement of ECM molecules in cell attachment, growth, and differentiation have revealed a central role of heparan sulfate (HS) proteoglycans (HSPGs) in early embryogenesis, morphogenesis, angiogenesis, and epithelial-mesenchymal interactions (1–3). HS chains bind a multitude of proteins and ensure that a wide variety of bioactive molecules (e.g., heparin-binding growth factors...

RATIONALE Lymphatic vessel growth is mediated by major prolymphangiogenic factors, such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF-C) and VEGF-D, among other endothelial effectors. Heparan sulfate is a linear polysaccharide expressed on proteoglycan core proteins on cell membranes and matrix, playing roles in angiogenesis, although little is known about any function(s) in lymphatic remodeling ...

It has been postulated that thrombin binds to endothelial cells through, at least in part, cell surface glycosaminoglycans such as heparan sulfate, which could serve as antithrombin cofactor on the endothelium. In the present study, we have directly evaluated the binding of 125I-labeled bovine thrombin to cultured porcine aortic endothelial cells. The thrombin binding to the cell surface was ra...