Figure 3.

ADAM15 and ADAM15 Δcyto exhibit reinforced binding to collagen type II (CII). Cells were adhered at various densities to CII, fibronectin and BSA. (A) Shown are results of representative adhesion experiments using vector‐transfected control cells (solid bar) and ADAM15‐transfected cells (open bar). (B) Cells expressing only the transmembrane‐anchored extracellular part of ADAM15 (Δcyto) also show stronger binding to CII compared with the control cells. (C) Cells expressing ADAM15 without the prodomain (Δ pro) exhibited the same binding to CII as control, and the additional removal of the MP‐domain (Δ ProMP) consistently reduced cell adhesion to about 25% below the level of vector control cells. All cells transfected with ADAM15 and the deletion constructs did not exhibit enhanced binding to fibronectin compared with the vector control cells and none of the cells exhibited binding to BSA (shown exemplarily for ADAM15‐ and Δcyto‐transfected cells). Values are the mean and standard deviations of quadruplicates.