Topic summary
Desmosomes
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Desmosome.
Structure
Desmosomes are composed of desmosome-intermediate filament complexes (DIFCs), a network of cadherin proteins, linker proteins and intermediate filaments. The DIFCs can be broken into three regions: the extracellular core region ("desmoglea"), the outer dense plaque (ODP), and the inner dense plaque (IDP).