Cell death in development: Signaling pathways and core mechanisms

Abstract

Programmed cell death eliminates unneeded and dangerous cells in a timely and effective manner during development. In this review, we examine the role cell death plays during development in worms, flies and mammals. We discuss signaling pathways that regulate developmental cell death, and describe how they communicate with the core cell death pathways. In most organisms, the majority of developmental cell death is seen in the nervous system. Therefore we focus on what is known about the regulation of developmental cell death in this tissue. Understanding how the cell death is regulated during development may provide insight into how this process can be manipulated in the treatment of disease.

Keywords: Cell death; Development; Drosophila; Hox; Notch; Ras.

Figure 1. Core cell death machinery in C. elegans, Drosophila and mammals

The core cell death pathway is evolutionarily conserved. Homologues across each row are represented with symbols. Their interactions are shown graphically. Bir1,2 in worms and Cytochrome c in flies have not been shown to play a major role in programmed cell death (gray). Buffy (underlined) can be either pro-[155] or anti- apoptotic [156, 157]. Details of individual genes in the pathway can be found in [17, 26, 158]