Molecular mechanisms of cell death: recommendations of the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death 2018.

Over the past decade, the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death (NCCD) has formulated guidelines for the definition and interpretation of cell death from morphological, biochemical, and functional perspectives. Since the field continues to expand and novel mechanisms that orchestrate multiple cell death pathways are unveiled, we propose an updated classification of cell death subroutines focusing on mechanistic and essential (as opposed to correlative and dispensable) aspects of the process. As we provide molecularly oriented definitions of terms including intrinsic apoptosis, extrinsic apoptosis, mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT)-driven necrosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, pyroptosis, parthanatos, entotic cell death, NETotic cell death, lysosome-dependent cell death, autophagy-dependent cell death, immunogenic cell death, cellular senescence, and mitotic catastrophe, we discuss the utility of neologisms that refer to highly specialized instances of these processes. The mission of the NCCD is to provide a widely accepted nomenclature on cell death in support of the continued development of the field

Determination of histamine in human plasma: the European external quality control study 1988

There is an increasing interest in measuring human plasma histamine levels in various clinical conditions. A variety of 'old' and newly developed techniques are applied to meet this demand. However, the discrepancy between reported reference values for histamine in human plasma measured using this variety of techniques, suggests the existence of a certain degree of inaccuracy and imprecision. We therefore organized an external quality control study on the reliability of current histamine determinations in European laboratories. Three lyophilized plasma quality control samples, in duplicate, covering the normal and pathological range of histamine concentrations (0-45 nmol/l), two different aqueous histamine standard samples and one solvent sample were sent to 10 laboratories for the analysis of their histamine content. The following methods were used: gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (n = 2), enzymatic single isotopic assay (n = 1), fluorometric-fluoroenzymatic assay (n = 3), radioimmunoassay (n = 3) and high performance liquid chromatography (n = 2). The study was performed and evaluated according to the approved recommendations (1983) of the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry (IFCC). The target values +/- s.d. of the three plasma samples were: 39.5 +/- 4.6 nmol/l (CV = 11.6%), 2.3 +/- 2.2 nmol/l (CV = 96%) and 8.9 +/- 1.5 nmol/l (CV = 17%), respectively.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS