[Cell Biology] The Future of Death

Douglas R. Green St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee 38105, USA Correspondence: douglas.greenstjude.org

In this collection, we have surveyed a great deal of information, organizing it into superficially complete signaling pathways that lead from a variety of stresses and developmental cues to the death of a cell. We understand, in principle, how a cell is specified for death, how this engages cell death pathways, how these are regulated, how death is performed, how the cell is removed, and the consequences for the cells that remain. It is tempting to think that what remains to be discovered are merely the details, mainly of interest to specialists. But is this “big picture” really complete, and are there approaches that we can use to determine this?

In this review, we consider two such approaches to this problem, one formal and one informal (but very important). The first involves taking what we know, modeling it mathematically, and asking whether the models we generate conform to what we …

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