“…Increasing evidence suggests that this protein is involved in a variety of functions, such as cell signaling (Tai et al, 1996;Griffith et al, 1991), cell growth , cell motility (Shaw et al, 1995;Schmidt et al, 1996), cell adhesion Anton et al, 1995;Masellis-Smith and Shaw, 1994), tumor cell metastasis (Ikeyama et al, 1993;Miyake et al, 1991;Si and Hersey, 1993), muscle cell formation (Tachibana and Hemler, 1999), development and maintenance of the neural system (Kaprielian et al, 1995;Tole and Patterson, 1993;Nakamura et al, 1996;Kagawa et al, 1997), sperm-egg fusion (Miyado et al, 2000;Le Naour et al, 2000;Kaji et al, 2000) and viral infections (Loffler et al, 1997;Schmid et al, 2000). CD9 forms complexes with a number of membrane proteins which include integrin =3>1 (Nakamura et al, 1995), =6>1 (Berditchevski et al, 1996;Hadjiargyrou et al, 1996), the neural adhesion molecule L1 (Schmidt et al, 1996), CD46 (Lozahic et al, 2000), the membrane-anchored form of heparin-binding EGF-like growth factor (proHB-EGF) (Iwamoto et al, 1994) and other members of the tetraspanins .…”