Apoptosis

Apoptosis is a complex series of protease pathways designed to kill cells in a selective manner. Apoptosis can simplistically be defined into linear pathways; however, each pathway is subject to fine control of its activity at multiple points. Other forms of cell survival regulation such as autophagy can impact on the outcome of a primary apoptosis signal. Alternatively, autophagy can be a primary signal that feeds into apoptosis resulting in cell killing. Thus, despite many years of investigation, there still remain many unanswered questions in the regulation of cell survival by apoptosis.