Beaded collagen filaments

Beaded filament and anchoring fibril collagens (types VI and VII) 508... 

Figure 6 Model of type VI collagen assembly. Two type VI collagen molecules assemble with 30 nm overlap " with two pairs of disulfide bonds between cysteines, one in collagenous domain and another in the C-terminal globular domain.Two dimers form a tetramer with disulfide bonds presumably in the a3(VI) chains. The tetramers assemble into the long beaded filamentous structure with 105nm periodicity.

In addition, the tetramers are seen to interact to form long chains (beaded filaments). Dimers, tetramers, and polymeric chains all have 30-75-30 nm spacing between the globular ends (Furthmayr et al., 1983 Von Der Mark et al., 1984 Wu et al., 1987). Collagen VI is found to bind to hyaluronan (Kielty et al., 1992), biglycan and decorin (Wiberg et al., 2001), fibrillin (Ueda and Yue, 2003), and other matrix constituents. 

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