Assays for cytotoxicity.

Abstract

AbstractAmong cytokine families, the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) superfamily stands out as the one that contains several members with cytotoxic activity (1–3). The best characterized is the prototypic member TNF-α, which is cytotoxic to a range of tumor cells, but not to most types of normal cells (1,4). However, there are now known to be around 20 molecularly related members of the TNF superfamily, several of which induce programmed cell death, i.e., apoptosis, in particular types of normal and tumor cells (1–3). The nomenclature for the members of the TNF superfamily was becoming complicated; individual members were given different names, e.g., Fas ligand, CD95 ligand, APO-1 ligand, by the competing research groups involved in their discovery. Recently, a nomenclature committee has adopted and promoted a simplified naming system; each member is designated tumor necrosis factor super family, TNFSF, with a numerical suffix. Thus, for example, TNF-α becomes TNFSF2 and Fas ligand becomes TNFSF6 (see Table 1 for the full list). Table 1 TNF Ligand and Receptor Superfamily Members a Full size table KeywordsMetabolic InhibitorFormazan ProductCell Growth MediumTumor Necrosis Factor SuperfamilyGentian VioletThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.