Expression of highly polysialylated neural cell adhesion molecule in calcitonin-producing cells

Evidence for the presence of N‐CAM 180 on astrocytes from rat cerebellum and differences in glycan structures between N‐CAM 120 and N‐CAM 140

“…Polysialic acid may be of considerable functional importance; its removal increases the rate of N-CAM homophilic interactions . The monoclonal antibody, AF11, used in this study reacts specifically with N-CAM, including polysialylated N-CAM (Nishiyama et al, 1993). We did not detect any polysialylated N-CAM isoforms, which should appear as broad diffuse bands on SDS-PAGE around 230 kDa (Ono et al, 1992) in the solubilized fractions of either neurons or of astrocytes from the rat cerebellum (Fig.…”

Neural cell adhesion molecule immunoreactivity in Merkel cells and Merkel cell tumours

“…However, since the immunostaining was not restricted to synaptic areas of the receptor cells, other authors postulate that it cannot be argued that NCAM participates in synaptic formation [39]. NCAM has also been described in multiple endocrine and neuroendocrine cells including pituitary cells, adrenal cells, pancreatic islet cells, thyroid C cells, testicular Leydig cells, ovarian granulosa cells and pulmonary neuroendocrine cells [5,12,17,19,20,21,23,24,28,30,33,37]. Since most of these cells lack contacts with nerve fibres, NCAM cannot obviously act in nerve-cell recognition in these cases.…”