1.12 - Modes of Chemically Induced Cell Death

Abstract

There are many modes of cell death. In this article, we have morphologically classified the various modes of cell death into three categories (types I–III) that correspond roughly to apoptosis, autophagic cell death (also known as “cell death associated with autophagy” or “autophagy-dependent cell death”), and necrosis, respectively. In the 1980s and 1990s, the executional mechanism of apoptosis was elucidated through genetic analyses of a multicellular nematode, C. elegance. This was followed by the discovery of the molecular mechanism of autophagy in experiments on a unicellular organism, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, in the 1990s and 2000s. Although a biochemical characterization of necrosis was lacking, a number of molecular mechanisms that lead to necrosis have been reported over the last two decades. As cell death is the ultimate form of cytotoxicity and chemicals induce cell death in a variety of ways, diverse modes of cell death have been reported for chemical cytotoxicity. This article will describe cell death modalities with an emphasis on the similarities and diversity of their regulatory mechanisms.