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Cell biology

Dying to hold you

Nature volume 451, pages 530–531 (2008)Cite this article

Certain cells bind so tightly to each other that, on occasion, one cell ends up inside another, usually with fatal consequences for the ingested cell. This involuntary cell death might help protect us from cancer.

The epithelial cells that cover most of the surfaces of our bodies create tight physical barriers that protect us from the outside world. To do this effectively, these cells need to stick to each other very well — which they do, thanks to molecular Velcro proteins known as cadherins. In a provocative study published in Cell, Overholtzer et al.1 show that unless epithelial cells are physically restrained, their strong affinity for each other can turn into a deadly embrace, with one cell ending up inside the other. To make the story even more intriguing, the authors show that the internalized cell usually dies by means of a molecular mechanism unlike any other known.

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Figure 1: Breaching the limit of intimacy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kimon Doukoumetzidis and Michael O. Hengartner are at the Institute of Molecular Biology, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland. michael.hengartner@molbio.uzh.ch,

    Kimon Doukoumetzidis & Michael O. Hengartner

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  1. Kimon Doukoumetzidis
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  2. Michael O. Hengartner
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Doukoumetzidis, K., Hengartner, M. Dying to hold you. Nature 451, 530–531 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/451530a

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