Apoptosis is about as complex a cellular choreography as one can imagine. Death signals impinge, chromatin cleaves, mitochondria release cell-destroying contents, and membranes undulate and form blebs, eventually shrink-wrapping the shattered cell into neat packages destined for the innards of a phagocyte. Many research groups are deciphering the cascades of proteins that orchestrate the program.
Stanley Korsmeyer, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston, is one of them. In experiments spanning more than a decade, his group has clarified the roles of certain key proteins that regulate the mitochondrial arm of apoptosis. This issues' Hot Papers1,2 "represent milestones in the research on how BCL-2 family members control the process of cell death," says Luca Scorrano, an assistant scientist at the Dulbecco Telethon Institute at Padova University in Italy and a recent member of the Korsmeyer team.
Sten Orrenius, professor of toxicology at the Karolinska ...
