Team:UCSF/Cadherin

Cadherin is an adhesive transmembrane and calcium dependent protein that is expressed in many mammalian tissue cells and plays a role in keeping tissues together. It has a domain that anchors the protein to the cytoskeleton of the mammalian cells, an intercellular domain, and five extracellular domain repeats. With the presence of calcium ions, the extracellalur domains become rigid and are able to form homodimers with the same type of cadherin or form heterodimers with different types of cadherin, hence creating cell to cell adhesion.

Note: This E-cadherin only contains the extracellular domains of the protein.

We cloned E-cadherin into our plasmid pCTCON2 because pCTCON2 contained the Aga1 and Aga2 protein gene sequences which helped display our E-cadherin and other cloned proteins on the surface of S. cerevisiae. pCTCON2 also contains a Galactose promoter and our proteins were only displayed when S. cerevisiaewas grown under the presence of galactose.

Figure 1: Control, non-induced Cadherin yeast. Dispersed, no major clustering.

Figure 2: Experiment, induced Cadherin expressing yeast. 3-D cluster of yeast cells growing around and on top of other cells. 1mM Ca+ was added to the media.