E-Cadherin and β-catenin are the best studied representatives of the superfamilies of
transmembrane cadherins and intracellular armadillo catenins, respectively. However, in
over 600 million years of multicellular animal evolution, these two superfamilies have
diversified remarkably both structurally and functionally. Although their basic building blocks,
respectively, the cadherin repeat domain and the armadillo repeat domain, predate
metazoans, the specific and complex domain compositions of the different family members …

Mining newly sequenced genomes of basal metazoan organisms reveals the evolutionary
origin of modern protein families. Specific cell–cell adhesion and intracellular
communication are key processes in multicellular animals, and members of the cadherin
superfamily are essential players in these processes. Mammalian genomes contain over
100 genes belonging to this superfamily. By a combination of tBLASTn and profile hidden
Markov model analyses, we made an exhaustive search for cadherins and compiled the …