Glycoprotein VI (GPVI) is a platelet-specific glycoprotein that has been indicated to react with collagen and activate platelets. Its structure was recently identified by cDNA cloning (Clemetson, J. M., Polgar, J., Magnenat, E., Wells, T. N., and Clemetson, K. J. (1999) J. Biol. Chem. 274, 29019 -29024). However, the mechanism of the interaction between collagen and GPVI has not been analyzed in detail because both collagen and GPVI are insoluble molecules. In this study, we expressed the extracellular domain of GPVI as soluble forms as follows: the monomeric form (GPVIex) and the dimeric form of GPVI fused with the human immunoglobulin Fc domain (GPVI-Fc 2 ). Purified GPVIex strongly inhibited convulxin (Cvx)-induced platelet aggregation but only weakly inhibited that induced by collagen-related peptide. However, only GPVI-Fc 2 , and not GPVIex, inhibited collagen-induced platelet aggregation. The dimeric form of GPVI exhibits high affinity for collagen, as concluded from measurements of GPVI binding to immobilized collagen by both the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and surface plasmon resonance methods. GPVI-Fc 2 bound to the surface of immobilized collagen with a dissociation constant (K D ) of 5.76 ؋ 10 ؊7 M, but the binding of GPVIex was too weak to allow estimation of this parameter. Cvx did not inhibit the binding of dimeric GPVI to collagen, indicating that the binding site of GPVI to collagen was different from that to Cvx. Taken together, our data indicate that the high affinity binding site for collagen is composed from two chains of GPVI. Furthermore, they suggest that the binding sites for Cvx are different from the collagen-binding sites and do not need to be formed by two GPVI molecules. Because dimeric GPVI is the only form that shows high affinity to fibrous collagen, our results indicate that GPVI would be present as a dimeric form on the platelet. Moreover, surface plasmon resonance indicated that there is no detectable interaction between soluble collagen and GPVI, supporting our previous observation that GPVI only reacts with fibrous collagen.Collagen is one of the major components of the vessel wall. When the vessel wall becomes damaged, platelets adhere to and are activated on the exposed collagen surface, leading to thrombus formation. Many proteins on the platelet surface were reported to be putative collagen receptors, but among them, only two glycoproteins have properties consistent with them being relevant collagen receptors under normal physiological conditions: one is glycoprotein (GP) 1 VI and the other is integrin ␣ 2  1 (GPIa/IIa). Platelets deficient in either integrin ␣ 2  1 (1, 2) or GPVI (3, 4) show loss of reactivity toward collagen, and antibodies against integrin ␣ 2  1 , such as 6F1 (5) and P1E6 (6), and the Fab fragment of an anti-GPVI antibody (7) inhibited collagen-induced platelet aggregation. Snake venom convulxin (Cvx) (8) and collagen-related peptide (CRP), which mimic the collagen triple helix (9), can each activate platelets by binding specifically to GPVI,...