Issue 265 / January 2024
Rupture
Who has not been accosted by someone they would prefer to avoid? You greet them meekly, exchange a few polite words while wondering how to cut the exchange short without being disrespectful. If being disrespectful is not an issue, however, things become gloriously easy. You could tell them that their company bores you, that you have more important things to tend to or interrupt the chat with a brisk shake of the hand and move on. If you were part of a cartoon strip, you could burst into flames or simply disintegrate. It so happens that cells can actually opt to disintegrate when dealing with something that has become toxic to their environment, or at any rate redundant. This can be a virus, a bacterium, or perhaps simply age. Such an option is generally called programmed cell death, or apoptosis. And as there are many ways of being disrespectful to your acquaintance, there are many ways a cell can choose to disappear. One is by generating fatal rips in its own plasma membrane. Though rips such as these have been observed by scientists for many years, plasma membrane rupture was long believed to be a passive event. Until a protein known as ninjurin-1 was discovered.
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Protein Spotlight (ISSN 1424-4721) is a monthly review written by the
Swiss-Prot team of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
Spotlight articles describe a specific protein or family of proteins on an informal tone. |