ABSTRACT

Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is a critical process in many areas of biology such as morphological modeling of tissues during development, removal of autoreactive immune cells, hormonal or age-related tissue atrophy and normal cell turnover. During apoptosis, cells, by virtue of their own genetic makeup, die and are deleted for the overall good of the organism. This process occurs in many plant and animal species, in diverse cell types and in response to a large number of different inducing agents. However, programmed cell death is not the only process by which cells die. Cells may also die by a catastrophic process called necrosis which usually results from physical trauma to the cell causing the plasma membrane to be compromised. While necrosis is used by organisms in a few physiological processes, such as complementmediated lysis, its occurrence is rare and apoptosis is, by far, the predominant form of physiological cell death.