But the story doesn't end there: antagonists exist to antagonize the IAPs; these molecules send the cell back down the apoptosis pathway. For example, three IAP antagonists, Reaper, Grim and HID, have been identified in Drosophila. These proteins promote cell death by binding to the IAPs, keeping them from suppressing caspase activity. However, no similar IAP antagonists had been identified in mammals until the labs of David Vaux, Xiaodong Wang, and the editors of Cell crossed paths.
Vaux's lab was one of the first to identify mammalian homologs of the baculoviral IAPs (XIAP, cIAP1 and cIAP2). Vaux, principal research fellow at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne, Australia, hypothesized that, like their Drosophila counterparts, these IAPs could be controlled by pro-apoptotic proteins. When homologs for Reaper, Grim or HID couldn't be found by searching genomic databases, researchers took a different approach. Anne Verhagen, a postdoc in Vaux's lab, expressed ...
