Human/Mouse Frizzled-2 Antibody

Wnt signaling is involved in variety of developmental processes including cell fate determination, cell polarity, tissue patterning and control of cell proliferation. Members of the Frizzled family of proteins serve as receptors for the Wnt signaling pathway. The predicted structure of Frizzled proteins is similar among all family members, containing a divergent N-terminal signal peptide, a highly conserved extracellular cysteine-rich domain, a variable-length linker region, a seven-pass transmembrane domain, and a variable-length C-terminal tail. One of the most conserved regions of the Frizzled proteins is the extracellular cysteine-rich domain (CRD) which spans approximately 120 AA and contains 10 invariant cysteines (1). Mouse Frizzled-2 shows 100% amino acid identity to human and rat Frizzled-2 in the CRD region. Frizzled-2 expression is greater in embryonic than adult tissues, with heart, brain, lung, kidney and gut showing the highest levels (2). In addition, Frizzled-2 is expressed during migration and proliferation of neural crest cells that populate the heart and great arteries (3). A non-canonical Frizzled-2 pathway has been shown to regulate Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) and metastasis (4). Secreted frizzled related proteins (sFRPs), antagonists of the Wnt pathway, have been shown to interact with both Wnt ligands and Frizzled receptors (5).