Apoptosis is nowadays what comes first to your scientist mind when someone mentions cellular suicide. However this is not the sole form of programmed cell death and many other alternative or atypical pathways have now been described. These pathways are indeed rather preferred to apoptosis in some instances based on tissue origin, cell type or development stage of the target cell. In this review, we describe many different programmed cell death subtypes according to their characteristics. Discrete, brutal, final or singular cell death pathways all participate in the elimination of unwanted, damaged or dangerous cells in organisms hence contributing to our knowledge of this particular feature of living beings: dying! Through description of anoikis, necroptosis, entosis, netosis, pyroptosis or ferroptosis, we have no choice but to realize that programmed cell death comes in many flavors.
© 2013 médecine/sciences – Inserm.