Cell adhesion comes into play in almost all domains of life. The range of situations in which it occurs, involving organisms, living tissues, microorganisms or single cells, is endless. Cell adhesion is involved in the binding of a cell to a surface, extracellular matrix, or another cell using cell adhesion molecules. It is crucial in the formation and maintenance of coherent multicellular structures. Cell surface adhesion molecules (integrins, for example) which transmit information from the extracellular matrix to the cell play vital roles in numerous cellular processes. Some of these include: cell growth, differentiation, embryogenesis, immune cell transmigration and response, and cancer metastasis. Also cell adhesion is involved in most of pathological situations. This book is divided into four parts as follows: Part 1: Fundamentals of Cell Adhesion; Part 2: Methods to Study Cell Adhesion; Part 3: Surface Treatments to Control Cell Adhesion and Behavior; and Part 4: Cell Adhesion in Medicine and Therapy. A bountiful information is covered in this book which represents the cumulative wisdom of many world-renowned researchers( physicists, materials scientists, chemists and biologists) engaged in unraveling the mechanisms of cell adhesion and how to mitigate or control it. It quite patent from the topics covered in this book that the subject of cell adhesion is truly interdisciplinary. This book should be of great interest and value to anyone interested in cell adhesion which is vitally important to human life.

Cell adhesion comes into play in almost all domains of life. The range of situations in which it occurs, involving organisms, living tissues, microorganisms or single cells, is endless. Cell adhesion is involved in the binding of a cell to a surface, extracellular matrix, or another cell using cell adhesion molecules. It is crucial in the formation

Presents a synopsis of the theoretical principles and practical experience concerning the interfacial behaviour of bioproducts. The volume offers an interdisciplinary approach to the subject that highlights the importance of interfacial phenomena in bioprocessing systems, and the tools used to study and interpret the phenomena. It contains coverage ranging from fundamentals of bioproduct and solid surface structure to the interactions of multicomponent mixtures in heterogeneous.

The Present book is aimed at providing a readable account of physical methods and results required to measure cell adhesion and interpret experimental data. Since on the one hand readability seemed a major quality for a book, and on the other hand, the problems posed referred to a wide range of domains of physics, chemistry, and biology, completeness had to sacrificed. Indeed, a whole book would not suffice to quote the relevant literature (and many more authors would be required to have read it). Hence, only a limited number of topics were selected for reliability of methods, availability of enough experimental results to illustrate basic conception or potential use in the future. These were discussed in three sections.

The aim of "The Adhesive Interaction of Cells" has been to assemble a series of reviews by leading international experts embracing many of the most important recent developments in this rapidly expanding field. The purpose of all biological research is to understand the form and function of living organisms and, by comprehending the normal, to find explanations and remedies for the abnormal and for disease conditions. The molecules involved in cell adhesion are of fundamental importance to the structure and function of all multicellular organisms. In this book, the contributors focus on the systems of vertebrates, especially mammals, since these are most relevant to human disease. It would have been equally possible to concentrate on developmental processes and adhesion in lower organisms. A major function of adhesion molecules is to bind cells to each other or to the extracellular matrix, but they are much more than "glue". Adhesions in animal tissues must be dynamic-forming, persisting, or declining in regulated fashion- to facilitate the mobility and turnover of tissue cells. Moreover, the majority of adhesion molecules are transmembrane molecules and thus provide links between the cells and their surroundings. This gives rise to another major function of adhesion molecules, the capacity to transduce signals across the hydrophobic barrier imposed by the plasma membrane. Such signal transduction is crucially important to many aspects of cellular function including the regulation of cell motility, gene expression, and differentiation. The work in this book progresses through four sections. Part I discusses the four major families of adhesion molecules themselves, the integrins (Green and Humphries), the cadherins (Stappert and Kemler), the selectins (Tedder et al.) and the immunoglobulin superfamily (Simmons); part 2 considers junctional complexes involved in cell interactions: focal adhesions and adherens junctions (Ben Ze'ev), desmosomes (Garrod et al.), and tight junctions (Citi and Cordenonsi). The signaling role of adhesion molecules is the focus of part 3, through integrins and the extracellular matrix (Edwards and Streuli), through platelet adhesion (Du and Ginsberg), and in the nervous system (Hemperley). In part 4, the aim is to show how adhesive phenomena contribute to important aspects of cell behavior and human health. Leukocyte trafficking (Haskard et al.), cancer metastasis (Marshall and Hart), cell migration (Paleck et al.), and implantation and placentation (Damsky et al.) are the topics considered in depth. The different sections are, of course, not mutually exclusive: it is both undesirable and impossible to separate structure from function when considering cell adhesion. Each chapter has its unique features, but some overlap is both invevitable and valuable since it provides different perspectives on closely related topics. We hope that the whole contributes a valuable and stimulating consideration of this important topic.

Adhesive Interactions in Normal and Transformed Cells describes the basic mechanisms of the ability of tissue cells to attach to each other and to the extracellular matrix. These adhesive interactions are pivotal regulators of main cellular functions, such as proliferation, survival and migration. The adhesive interactions are involved in embryonic development, regeneration, and also in inflammation and degeneration processes, which are at the basis of many diseases. Serious alterations in cell adhesion caused by the oncogenic transformation play a key role in cancer invasion and metastasis. This volume provides comprehensive information about structural, mechanistic and signaling aspects of adhesive interactions in both normal and cancer cells in comparison. Integration of such aspects of the adhesive process as structure, relation to cell systems of receptors and cytoskeleton, function, signaling pathways, and the alterations in tumor cells constitutes the strongest point of this work. The results of the long-time author’s research are included in the book. The author was one of pioneers, who used scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to study the cell surface morphology of normal cultured cells and the cells underwent the oncogenic transformation, processes of their attachment to and spreading on the surfaces of a solid substratum, and also surprising ability of the cells to respond to various geometric configurations of the substrata surfaces. Adhesive Interactions in Normal and Transformed Cells has both biological and medical aspects and, therefore, it can be interesting not only for cell biologists, developmental biologists and cancer researchers, but also for physicians. It is intended for researchers, postdocs, undergraduate and graduate students.

The Present book is aimed at providing a readable account of physical methods and results required to measure cell adhesion and interpret experimental data. Since on the one hand readability seemed a major quality for a book, and on the other hand, the problems posed referred to a wide range of domains of physics, chemistry, and biology, completeness had to sacrificed. Indeed, a whole book would not suffice to quote the relevant literature (and many more authors would be required to have read it). Hence, only a limited number of topics were selected for reliability of methods, availability of enough experimental results to illustrate basic conception or potential use in the future. These were discussed in three sections.