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(Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. 2008;28:2094.)
© 2008 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorials

Ninein Leads the Way in Vessel Sprouting

Victoria L. Bautch

From the Department of Biology and Carolina Cardiovascular Biology Center, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Correspondence to Victoria L Bautch, PhD, Department of Biology, CB#3280, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599. E-mail bautch@med.unc.edu

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

Angiogenic sprouting is required to form an interconnected network of blood vessels. Vessel sprouting is essentially the coordinated migration of a group of endothelial cells toward a signal source, such as VEGF. This group of cells needs a leader, and much recent work has focused on how the leader, or "tip cell," is chosen. However, how the tip cell reorganizes it’s cellular machinery to specialize in forward movement is not well understood. In this issue, Matsumoto and colleagues have identified ninein as a microtubule-binding protein with a dynamic cellular localization in endothelial cells that correlates with the behavior of the cell.¹ They have also elucidated a role for ninein in vessel tube formation in several models, thus providing the first evidence that ninein function is required for blood vessel formation. These findings help us begin to understand how extrinsic signals might link to cell behaviors in blood vessels, and they also have potential implications for cancer therapeutics, as discussed below.

See accompanying article on page 2123

Ninein was identified as a centrosomal protein by Morgensen et al,² and it can both nucleate and anchor microtubules at their minus-end. This suggests a complex relationship between ninein and microtubule (MT) dynamics in the cell, and in fact ninein is associated with anchoring MTs at the centrosome. Ninein is also able to anchor MTs at noncentrosomal sites, and this function is thought to be important when epithelial cells polarize their MT network away from the centrosome.^2,3 Ninein also associates with, and likely nucleates, . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Related Article:

Ninein Is Expressed in the Cytoplasm of Angiogenic Tip-Cells and Regulates Tubular Morphogenesis of Endothelial Cells

Taro Matsumoto, Petter Schiller, Lothar C. Dieterich, Fuad Bahram, Yuji Iribe, Ulf Hellman, Charlotte Wikner, Gordon Chan, Lena Claesson-Welsh, and Anna Dimberg
Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol 2008 28: 2123-2130. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]