Apoptosis

Apoptosis
An etoposide-treated DU145 prostate cancer cell exploding into a cascade of apoptotic bodies. The sub images were extracted from a 61-hour time-lapse microscopy video, created using quantitative phase-contrast microscopy. The optical thickness is color-coded. With increasing thickness, color changes from gray to yellow, red, purple and finally black. See the video at The Cell: An Image Library
Anatomical terminology []

Apoptosis (from Ancient Greek ἀπόπτωσις "falling off") is a process of programmed cell death that occurs in multicellular organisms.Biochemical events lead to characteristic cell changes (morphology) and death. These changes include blebbing, cell shrinkage, nuclear fragmentation, chromatin condensation, chromosomal DNA fragmentation, and global mRNA decay. Between 50 and 70 billion cells die each day due to apoptosis in the average human adult. For an average child between the ages of 8 and 14, approximately 20 billion to 30 billion cells die a day.

In contrast to necrosis, which is a form of traumatic cell death that results from acute cellular injury, apoptosis is a highly regulated and controlled process that confers advantages during an organism's lifecycle. For example, the separation of fingers and toes in a developing human embryo occurs because cells between the digits undergo apoptosis. Unlike necrosis, apoptosis produces cell fragments called apoptotic bodies that phagocytic cells are able to engulf and quickly remove before the contents of the cell can spill out onto surrounding cells and cause damage to the neighboring cells.

Because apoptosis cannot stop once it has begun, it is a highly regulated process. Apoptosis can be initiated through one of two pathways. In the intrinsic pathway the cell kills itself because it senses cell stress, while in the extrinsic pathway the cell kills itself because of signals from other cells. Both pathways induce cell death by activating caspases, which are proteases, or enzymes that degrade proteins. The two pathways both activate initiator caspases, which then activate executioner caspases, which then kill the cell by degrading proteins indiscriminately.