Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a β-herpesvirus that infects most of the world's population and poses a serious threat to human health. The constant exposure of HCMV to the innate immune system makes this virus evolve a ...
Oct 9, 2023
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A team of researchers from Genentech, Inc., the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center, has found that cancerous tumor cells are able to survive attacks by repairing holes in their membranes ...
Metastatic cells occur in many forms of cancer. They originate in primary tumors and then break away and migrate. They travel through the tissues surrounding them, through blood vessels or lymphatic channels. Along the way, ...
Mar 8, 2022
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The enzyme caspase-8 induces a molecular cell death programme called pyroptosis without involving its enzymatic activity, a new study by Hamid Kashkar published in Nature shows. In order to safeguard healthy and functioning ...
Nov 26, 2019
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Cancer cells are characterised by the ability to evade apoptosis, a type of programmed cell death that allows the organism to remove damaged cells. Many studies devoted to new chemotherapy treatments aim to induce apoptosis ...
Apr 17, 2019
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Cell death is an important aspect of tissue homeostasis, as well as inflammation and disease pathogenesis related to infection, injury, and tumor growth. Tumor necrosis factor-α (TNFα) coordinates cell death in a variety ...
Jan 17, 2019
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Leuven researchers led by professor Bart De Strooper (VIB-KU Leuven) have identified a new role for PARL, a protein linked to Parkinson's disease. In this week's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, ...
Jan 3, 2019
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Scientists from the VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research identified the mechanisms by which the bacterial pathogen Clostridium difficile kills intestinal epithelial cells (IECs), thus destroying the protective mucosal ...
Nov 21, 2018
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A highly detailed study of how the roundworm C. elegans forms oocytes suggests that the egg-making process leads to the formation and subsequent destruction of cells with an extra nucleus, but that some cellular materials ...
Jul 19, 2018
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Structural biologists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have discovered how a key protein functions to trigger cell's suicide machinery, called apoptosis. The scientists found that the protein, called BOK, is controlled ...
May 17, 2018
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Apoptosis ( /ˌæpəˈtoʊsɪs/) is the process of programmed cell death (PCD) that may occur in multicellular organisms. Biochemical events lead to characteristic cell changes (morphology) and death. These changes include blebbing, cell shrinkage, nuclear fragmentation, chromatin condensation, and chromosomal DNA fragmentation. (See also Apoptosis DNA fragmentation.) Unlike necrosis, apoptosis produces cell fragments called apoptotic bodies that phagocytic cells are able to engulf and quickly remove before the contents of the cell can spill out onto surrounding cells and cause damage.
In contrast to necrosis, which is a form of traumatic cell death that results from acute cellular injury, apoptosis, in general, confers advantages during an organism's life cycle. For example, the differentiation of fingers and toes in a developing human embryo occurs because cells between the fingers apoptose; the result is that the digits are separate. Between 50 and 70 billion cells die each day due to apoptosis in the average human adult. For an average child between the ages of 8 and 14, approximately 20 billion to 30 billion cells die a day.
Research in and around apoptosis has increased substantially since the early 1990s. In addition to its importance as a biological phenomenon, defective apoptotic processes have been implicated in an extensive variety of diseases. Excessive apoptosis causes atrophy, whereas an insufficient amount results in uncontrolled cell proliferation, such as cancer.
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