Modulation of vascular endothelial cell growth by basement membrane heparan sulfate was investigated using four lines of normal and transformed cells. The growth of transformed endothelial cells, but not normal cells, on reconstituted basement membrane was severely suppressed when heparan sulfate, one of the components of the membrane, was specifically degraded by an enzyme, heparitinase. Simil...

Alphaviruses are arthropod-borne viruses with wide species ranges and diverse tissue tropisms. The cell surface receptors which allow infection of so many different species and cell types are still incompletely characterized. We show here that the widely expressed glycosaminoglycan heparan sulfate can participate in the binding of Sindbis virus to cells. Enzymatic removal of heparan sulfate or ...

A chemoenzymatic approach for synthesizing heparan sulfate oligosaccharides with a reactive diazoacetyl saccharide residue is reported. The resultant oligosaccharides were demonstrated to serve as specific inhibitors for heparan sulfate sulfotransferases, offering a new set of tools to probe the structural selectivity for heparan sulfate-binding proteins.

Heparan sulfate is a molecule that possesses a large structural variability and which has been shown to inhibit the proliferation of fibroblasts in vitro. The aim of this study was to determine whether the anti-proliferative effects of heparan sulfate were exerted by regulation of the activity of the platelet-derived growth factor and/or of the platelet-derived growth factor receptors. Both l-i...

Heparan sulfate fractions were isolated from three normal human livers and three cancerous human liver tissues, and their polyanionic properties were examined using electrophoresis, sequential partition fractionation, and chemical analyses. More than 60% of total glycosaminoglycans from normal human liver and about 30% from cancerous liver tissue were found to be heparan sulfate from their resi...

CD44 variant exon (CD44v) 3 is a heparan sulfate-binding isoform of CD44. The role of CD44v3 in invasion and metastasis associated with heparan sulfate in colon cancer cell lines and cases of colon cancer was examined. Expression of CD44v3 mRNA and protein was observed in five of six human colorectal cancer cell lines. Colo320 and WiDr cells expressed CD44v3 at high levels. Heparan sulfate trea...

Heparan sulfate proteoglycans are ubiquitously found at the cell surface and extracellular matrix in all the animal species. This review will focus on the structural characteristics of the heparan sulfate proteoglycans related to protein interactions leading to cell signaling. The heparan sulfate chains due to their vast structural diversity are able to bind and interact with a wide variety of ...