What Is Apoptosis?

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Apoptosis is a form of programmed cell death that occurs in multicellular organisms. Biochemical events lead to characteristic cell changes and death. These changes include blebbing, cell shrinkage, nuclear fragmentation, chromatin condensation, chromosomal DNA fragmentation, and global mRNA decay.

The average adult human loses between 50 and 70 billion cells each day due to apoptosis. For an average human child between the ages of 8 and 14, approximately 20 to 30 billion cells die a day.

In contrast to necrosis, which is a form of traumatic cell death that results from acute cellular injury, apoptosis is a highly regulated and controlled process that confers advantages during an organism’s lifecycle. For example, the separation of fingers and toes in a developing human embryo occurs because cells between the digits undergo apoptosis.

Unlike necrosis, apoptosis produces cell fragments called apoptotic bodies that phagocytic cells are able to engulf and remove before the contents of the cell can spill out onto surrounding cells and cause damage to them.

Because apoptosis cannot stop once it has begun, it is a highly regulated process. Apoptosis can be initiated through one of two pathways.

In the intrinsic pathway, the cell kills itself because it senses cell stress, while in the extrinsic pathway the cell kills itself because of signals from other cells. Weak external signals may also activate the intrinsic pathway of apoptosis. Both pathways induce cell death by activating caspases, which are proteases, or enzymes that degrade proteins. The two pathways both activate initiator caspases, which then activate executioner caspases, which then kill the cell by degrading proteins indiscriminately.

Research on apoptosis has increased substantially since the early 1990s. In addition to its importance as a biological phenomenon, defective apoptotic processes have been implicated in a wide variety of diseases.

Excessive apoptosis causes atrophy, whereas an insufficient amount results in uncontrolled cell proliferation, such as cancer. Some factors like Fas receptors and caspases promote apoptosis, while some members of the Bcl-2 family of proteins inhibit apoptosis.

Apoptosis Activation Mechanisms

The initiation of apoptosis is tightly regulated by activation mechanisms, because once apoptosis has begun, it inevitably leads to the death of the cell. The two best-understood activation mechanisms are the intrinsic pathway (also called the mitochondrial pathway) and the extrinsic pathway.

The intrinsic pathway is activated by intracellular signals generated when cells are stressed and depends on the release of proteins from the intermembrane space of mitochondria. The extrinsic pathway is activated by extracellular ligands binding to cell-surface death receptors, which leads to the formation of the death-inducing signaling complex (DISC).

A cell initiates intracellular apoptotic signaling in response to a stress, which may bring about cell suicide. The binding of nuclear receptors by glucocorticoids, heat, radiation, nutrient deprivation, viral infection, hypoxia, increased intracellular concentration of free fatty acids and increased intracellular calcium concentration, for example, by damage to the membrane, can all trigger the release of intracellular apoptotic signals by a damaged cell.

A number of cellular components, such as poly ADP ribose polymerase (PARP), may also help regulate apoptosis. Single cell fluctuations have been observed in experimental studies of stress induced apoptosis.

Before the actual process of cell death is precipitated by enzymes, apoptotic signals must cause regulatory proteins to initiate the apoptosis pathway. This step allows those signals to cause cell death, or the process to be stopped, should the cell no longer need to die.

Several proteins are involved, but two main methods of regulation have been identified: the targeting of mitochondria functionality, or directly transducing the signal via adaptor proteins to the apoptotic mechanisms. An extrinsic pathway for initiation identified in several toxin studies is an increase in calcium concentration within a cell caused by drug activity, which also can cause apoptosis via a calcium binding protease calpain.

Intrinsic Pathway

The mitochondria are essential to multicellular life. Without them, a cell ceases to respire aerobically and quickly dies. This fact forms the basis for some apoptotic pathways.

Apoptotic proteins that target mitochondria affect them in different ways. They may cause mitochondrial swelling through the formation of membrane pores, or they may increase the permeability of the mitochondrial membrane and cause apoptotic effectors to leak out.

They are very closely related to intrinsic pathway, and tumors arise more frequently through intrinsic pathway than the extrinsic pathway because of sensitivity. There is also a growing body of evidence indicating that nitric oxide is able to induce apoptosis by helping to dissipate the membrane potential of mitochondria and therefore make it more permeable.

Mitochondrial proteins known as SMACs (second mitochondria-derived activator of caspases) are released into the cell’s cytosol following the increase in permeability of the mitochondria membranes. SMAC binds to proteins that inhibit apoptosis (IAPs) thereby deactivating them, and preventing the IAPs from arresting the process and therefore allowing apoptosis to proceed.

IAP also normally suppresses the activity of a group of cysteine proteases called caspases, which carry out the degradation of the cell. Therefore, the actual degradation enzymes can be seen to be indirectly regulated by mitochondrial permeability.

Cytochrome c is also released from mitochondria due to formation of a channel, the mitochondrial apoptosis-induced channel (MAC), in the outer mitochondrial membrane, and serves a regulatory function as it precedes morphological change associated with apoptosis. Once cytochrome c is released it binds with Apoptotic protease activating factor – 1 (Apaf-1) and ATP, which then bind to pro-caspase-9 to create a protein complex known as an apoptosome. The apoptosome cleaves the pro-caspase to its active form of caspase-9, which in turn activates the effector caspase-3.

MAC (not to be confused with the membrane attack complex formed by complement activation, also commonly denoted as MAC), also called “Mitochondrial Outer Membrane Permeabilization Pore” is regulated by various proteins, such as those encoded by the mammalian Bcl-2 family of anti-apoptopic genes, the homologs of the ced-9 gene found in C. elegans. Bcl-2 proteins are able to promote or inhibit apoptosis by direct action on MAC/MOMPP. Bax and/or Bak form the pore, while Bcl-2, Bcl-xL or Mcl-1 inhibit its formation.

Extrinsic Pathway

Two theories of the direct initiation of apoptotic mechanisms in mammals have been suggested: the TNF-induced (tumor necrosis factor) model and the Fas-Fas ligand-mediated model, both involving receptors of the TNF receptor (TNFR) family coupled to extrinsic signals.

TNF Path

TNF-alpha is a cytokine produced mainly by activated macrophages, and is the major extrinsic mediator of apoptosis. Most cells in the human body have two receptors for TNF-alpha: TNFR1 and TNFR2.

The binding of TNF-alpha to TNFR1 has been shown to initiate the pathway that leads to caspase activation via the intermediate membrane proteins TNF receptor-associated death domain (TRADD) and Fas-associated death domain protein (FADD). cIAP1/2 can inhibit TNF-α signaling by binding to TRAF2. FLIP inhibits the activation of caspase-8.

Binding of this receptor can also indirectly lead to the activation of transcription factors involved in cell survival and inflammatory responses. However, signalling through TNFR1 might also induce apoptosis in a caspase-independent manner. The link between TNF-alpha and apoptosis shows why an abnormal production of TNF-alpha plays a fundamental role in several human diseases, especially in autoimmune diseases.

Fas Path

The fas receptor (First apoptosis signal) – (also known as Apo-1 or CD95) is a transmembrane protein of the TNF family which binds the Fas ligand (FasL). The interaction between Fas and FasL results in the formation of the death-inducing signaling complex (DISC), which contains the FADD, caspase-8 and caspase-10.

In some types of cells (type I), processed caspase-8 directly activates other members of the caspase family, and triggers the execution of apoptosis of the cell. In other types of cells (type II), the Fas-DISC starts a feedback loop that spirals into increasing release of proapoptotic factors from mitochondria and the amplified activation of caspase-8.

Common Components

Following TNF-R1 and Fas activation in mammalian cells a balance between proapoptotic (BAX, BID, BAK, or BAD) and anti-apoptotic (Bcl-Xl and Bcl-2) members of the Bcl-2 family are established. This balance is the proportion of proapoptotic homodimers that form in the outer-membrane of the mitochondrion.

The proapoptotic homodimers are required to make the mitochondrial membrane permeable for the release of caspase activators such as cytochrome c and SMAC. Control of proapoptotic proteins under normal cell conditions of nonapoptotic cells is incompletely understood, but in general, Bax or Bak are activated by the activation of BH3-only proteins, part of the Bcl-2 family.

Caspases

Caspases play the central role in the transduction of ER apoptotic signals. Caspases are proteins that are highly conserved, cysteine-dependent aspartate-specific proteases. There are two types of caspases: initiator caspases, caspase 2,8,9,10,11,12, and effector caspases, caspase 3,6,7.

The activation of initiator caspases requires binding to specific oligomeric activator protein. Effector caspases are then activated by these active initiator caspases through proteolytic cleavage. The active effector caspases then proteolytically degrade a host of intracellular proteins to carry out the cell death program.

Green, Douglas
Means to an End: Apoptosis and other Cell Death Mechanisms
Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. ISBN 978-0-87969-888-1

Last Updated on November 12, 2022