Key Step In Programmed Cell Death Discovered

Investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have discovered a dance of proteins that protects certain cells from undergoing apoptosis, also known as programmed cell death. Understanding the fine points of apoptosis is important to researchers seeking ways to control this process. In a series of experiments, St. Jude researchers found that if any one of three molecules is missing, certain cells lose the ability to protect themselves from apoptosis. A report on this work appears in the advance online publication of Nature.

Comments

I for one....

[bytta]

I for one welcome our dancing protein overlords.

Cancer applications?

[PinchDuck]

I wonder if they could trigger apoptosis in cancer cells? That would be very cool

Re:Cancer applications?

[D.A. Zollinger]

Triggering apoptosis is the ultimate goal in cancer treatment. When a normal cell examines itself, and finds that it is genetically different, it will trigger apoptosis in order to sacrifice itself for the good of the being. Tumorigenic cells want to die, but for some reason the apoptosis mechanism never gets triggered, or is triggered and does not work. Therefore if researchers better understand what triggers apoptosis, then tumorigenic cells can be examined for those missing proteins. Perhaps if the apoptosis mechanism can be fixed, we will have a cure for the majority of cancer. There will still be a small number of tumorigenic cells which don't know they are different, thus have a perfectly working apoptosis mechanism which was never triggered.

Lets try putting this in computer terms. Say when you copy a file by downloading it off the internet, the file itself wants to ensure you have an exact duplicate. Therefore the file performs its own CRC check once it is downloaded. If it fails the CRC check, it deletes itself and you have to download another copy. Now imagine this is a file sharing operation, thus your copy gets shared with many others who are downloading the file from you. If your copy became corrupt in the download process, yet didn't delete itself, a corrupt version of the file would be spread across the Internet (Pandemonium! Cats and dogs sleeping together! Chaos!). Thus wouldn't you want to fix the broken mechanism so that the corrupt file deleted itself, so that the process is started over? Unfortunately there is also a minuscule chance that a corrupt file will generate an identical CRC value thus never triggering the deletion.

Immunization?

[headkase]

So can I be exposed to these three molecules in such a way that my immune system makes antibodies for them? Would be nice to be immunized against death.

Re:Approaching Immortality and the end of disease

[Oktober Sunset]

Where is the mod for -1 overfilled crackpipe? That was the biggest load of jibber jabber since time cube.

Actual article text

[DebateG]

The actual abstract and article can be found on Nature's website and is entitled Hax1-mediated processing of HtrA2 by Parl allows survival of lymphocytes and neurons. Essentially what the researchers showed was that the gene Hax1 keeps cells alive when they aren't being stimulated with survival signals. This is interesting, for example, because cancer metastasis cells must survive in very foreign environments where they probably aren't receiving these factors. On the flip side, deficiencies in Hax1 results in blood cells dying early, causing a disease called severe congenital neutropenia.

Re:immortality available to who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Solution is simple: free immortality, all you have to do is agree that you die if you ever have babies without permission. Not right away, but you start aging and eventually die as the treatment is reversed. Have a baby without permission, and grow old then die (your baby gets immortality treatment). That way when someone dies someone else gets an *authorized* baby, and the population remains stable. Maybe have a reversible sterilization (like a vasectomy) to prevent... accidents, while keeping baby-making ability in case of emergencies.

Now, obviously that stinks of china's "one baby" policy... but if people aren't willing to stop having babies on their own, either someone else has to stop having babies for them, or more people have to die. There is just not enough room for all the babies people want to have, sometimes. And if people aren't dying of old age... well then they can't keep making babies.

On a completely retarded sci-fi note... if we assume that we continue the trend of the west evolving into tall blond beautiful people, we stop aging about 20 and get quasi-immortality, and we advance science to the point where it looks like magic to most people and then integrate it into our biology and then our genetics... and then undergo an apocalypse so we forgot all this ever happened... Well then "we" get to be elves while people who didn't get (technology-so-advanced-it's-indistinguishable-from) magic, quasi-immortality, and a distinct look get to be regular humans. It could happen!

Some brief background

[sam_handelman]

There are four general situations where apoptosis is medically interesting. This particular result increases our understanding of apoptsis generally, so is potentially relevant to all of them:

a) Cancer. This is the big one. Your body has a natural defense against cancer - cells that would become cancerous undergo apoptosis and die. Only when this defense fails do you actually get cancer.

b) Viral Infections. Viruses (and a few bacteria, but it's not the same thing) get inside the individual cells of your body and take them over to make viruses. Again, your body defends itself by inducing apoptosis in affected cells - the virus will typically contain genes to try and prevent this.

c) Some degenerative diseases result from apoptosis being triggerred improperly in certain cells (Parkinsons' disease probably works this way.)

d) Aptoptosis plays a major role in normal human development; if this goes wrong, this may cause certain development defects.

Re:immortality available to who?

[Kenrod]

Programmed cell death happens in cells that are ready to die because they have become damaged or non-functional in some way. If you stop this natural mechanism you won't get immortality, you get a body that dies much faster, probably within weeks.