Apoptosis. Death by crowd control

Abstract

Cells often die by way of a controlled suicide called apoptosis. The proteins most responsible for the deed are caspases, specific proteases that are carefully regulated in the cell so that they only become activated when absolutely necessary. In his Perspective, Hengartner discusss results reported by Yang et al. in the same issue on how some of the central caspases responsible for cell death, such as CED-3, are activated by oligomerization, a process that is regulated by the anti-death protein CED-9, a member of the large Bcl-2 family