Every day, billions of our cells die and new, healthy ones take their place. In a healthy gut lining, as in most tissues, a type of cell death called apoptosis is thought to mediate this process almost entirely on its own. But researchers from RIKEN in Kobe, Japan, suspect they have discovered a new kind of cell death in the gut of a fruit fly. The new process, which they call erebosis or “deep darkness,” may be present in other tissues, the team reports April 25 in PLOS Biology —and if found in humans, it could affect how we understand diseases of the gastrointestinal tract.
María Domínguez Castellano, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Neurosciences in Alicante, Spain who didn’t work on the study, tells The Scientist she found the paper “very intriguing,” and hopes to see more from the researchers about the new putative form of cell death. “They’ve ...
