TY - JOUR JF - PLoS One KW - Animals KW - Cell Adhesion KW - HEK293 Cells KW - Humans KW - Immunoglobulins KW - MCF-7 Cells KW - Neural Cell Adhesion Molecule L1 KW - Neuregulins KW - Phosphorylation KW - Protein Binding KW - Protein Structure KW - Tertiary KW - Rats KW - Receptor KW - erbB-2 KW - Receptor KW - erbB-3 KW - Repetitive Sequences KW - Amino Acid KW - Signal Transduction KW - Structure-Activity Relationship A1 - Donier, E A1 - Gomez-Sanchez, JA A1 - Grijota-Martinez, C A1 - Lakomá, J A1 - Baars, S A1 - Garcia-Alonso, L A1 - Cabedo, H ID - discovery1388519 N2 - During nervous system development different cell-to-cell communication mechanisms operate in parallel guiding migrating neurons and growing axons to generate complex arrays of neural circuits. How such a system works in coordination is not well understood. Cross-regulatory interactions between different signalling pathways and redundancy between them can increase precision and fidelity of guidance systems. Immunoglobulin superfamily proteins of the NCAM and L1 families couple specific substrate recognition and cell adhesion with the activation of receptor tyrosine kinases. Thus it has been shown that L1CAM-mediated cell adhesion promotes the activation of the EGFR (erbB1) from Drosophila to humans. Here we explore the specificity of the molecular interaction between L1CAM and the erbB receptor family. We show that L1CAM binds physically erbB receptors in both heterologous systems and the mammalian developing brain. Different Ig-like domains located in the extracellular part of L1CAM can support this interaction. Interestingly, binding of L1CAM to erbB enhances its response to neuregulins. During development this may synergize with the activation of erbB receptors through L1CAM homophilic interactions, conferring diffusible neuregulins specificity for cells or axons that interact with the substrate through L1CAM. SN - 1932-6203 UR - htt://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0040674 N1 - © 2012 Donier et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.PMCID: PMC3398014 IS - 7 TI - L1CAM binds ErbB receptors through Ig-like domains coupling cell adhesion and neuregulin signalling. AV - public VL - 7 Y1 - 2012/07/16/ ER -