Back

Cholesterol-mediated tight junction formation

Shigetomi, K.; Ikenouchi, J.

2022-07-01 cell biology
10.1101/2022.06.30.498218 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Lipids have the ability to self-organize but the significance of this phenomenon in the assembly of membrane structures is unknown. We previously reported that cholesterol enrichment directs the formation of tight junctions (TJs), adhesion structures responsible for the epithelial barrier (Shigetomi et al., 2018). However, it is unclear how cholesterol accumulates and informs TJ formation. Cholesterol typically accumulates in the vicinity of apical cell junctions (Shigetomi et al., 2018). Surprisingly, cholesterol distribution is unaltered in an epithelial cell line that lacks TJs, generated by suppressing the expression of claudins, membrane proteins that determine the barrier properties of TJs. Assembly of claudin into hallmark strands is canonically thought to require binding to Zonula occludens (ZO) proteins but a claudin mutant that cannot bind to ZO proteins still form strands. These results suggest a novel mechanism for TJ formation that is dependent on cholesterol and reveal an unexpected role of ZO proteins as organizers of the cholesterol domain.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.