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Understanding the Molecular Basis for Differential Binding of Integrins to Collagen and Gelatin

Department of Biomedical Engineering and Institute of Theoretical Chemistry, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas

Correspondence: Address reprint requests and inquiries to Muhammad H. Zaman, E-mail: mhzaman{at}mail.utexas.edu.

Integrin-mediated cell adhesion plays a central role in cell migration and signaling. Overexpression of integrins is also associated with cancer invasion and metastasis. Although a number of problems in integrin-matrix interactions have been studied in detail, the molecular specificity, which increases integrin adhesion to native collagen but results in poor integrin-gelatin interaction, is not understood. In this report, we study the role of individual amino acids in integrin-collagen and integrin-gelatin interactions using long-term (>100 ns) molecular simulations. The results, which are force-field independent, show that denatured collagen induces helical conformations in integrin amino acids and significantly reduces the poly-proline II content, which stabilizes the integrin-collagen interactions. Our simulations provide a possible explanation of the molecular specificity in integrin binding and suggest new targets for regulating integrin-mediated invasion and metastasis.