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Apoptosis

An endonuclease at last

Nature volume 391, pages 20–21 (1998)Cite this article

Cell death is seldom chaotic. Rather, it is a subtly orchestrated disassembly of critical molecular structures, permitting the doomed cells to vanish with minimum disruption to the surrounding tissue. This idea was suggested by the uniform sequence of structural changes observed in cells dying in many different circumstances — the process of apoptosis1. That such death might be effected by a dedicated set of gene products became clear when developmental cell death in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans was shown to require the activity of several genes for which, to this day, no other major function has been identified2.

On pages 43 and 96 of this issue, two papers from Shigekazu Nagata's group describe a mechanism for disassembly during apoptosis of the most complex of all biological molecules, chromatin3,4. Despite earlier premonitions to the contrary, they find that chromatin is cleaved by a nuclease that is activated exclusively in apoptosis. And it is already clear that at least some elements of this mechanism are highly conserved between species.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Department of Pathology, Sir Alastair Currie CRC Laboratories, University of Edinburgh, EH4 2XU, Edinburgh, UK

    Andrew Wyllie

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  1. Andrew Wyllie
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Wyllie, A. An endonuclease at last. Nature 391, 20–21 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/34040

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