Apoptosis

Apoptosis is a form of programmed cell death in multicellular organisms. It is one of the main types of programmed cell death and involves a series of biochemical events leading to a characteristic cell morphology and death, in more specific terms, a series of biochemical events that lead to a variety of morphological changes, including blebbing, changes to the cell membranes such as loss of membrane asymmetry and attachment, cell shrinkage, nuclear fragmentation, chromatin condensation, and chromosomal DNA fragmentation. Processes of disposal of cellular debris whose results do not damage the organism differentiate apoptosis from necrosis.

Apoptosis Topics
»» AKT	»» Inhibitors of Apoptosis
»» BAX	»» NF-kB in Apoptosis
»» BCL2 Family	»» PARP
»» Caspases	»» p53

The availability of research tools for studying apoptosis has increased dramatically over the last ten years, paralleling the explosion of knowledge in the field. Today there is an extensive array of commercially available products including antibodies, inhibitors, dyes, recombinant proteins, as well as specialized kits to study and probe the complex process of apoptosis. Additionally,new products as well as new formats of existing products are being rapidly commercialized by biotechnology companies worldwide.

Research on 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 hypotrophy, such as in ischemic damage, whereas an insufficient amount results in uncontrolled cell proliferation, such as cancer.

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 billion 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. In a year, this amounts to the proliferation and subsequent destruction of a mass of cells equal to an individual's body weight.

Apoptosis products

: Apoptosis versus survival is a complex process with checks and balances that must function in a concerted manner to allow survival or induce death. A wide variety of cellular proteins, including cell surface receptors, adapters, proteases and mitochondrial components, are required to function along carefully delineated and regulated signaling pathways to permit cell suvival or to promote death by apoptosis.