Apoptosis and activation-induced cell death (AICD)

Abstract

The cell death can be a physiological process, related with the phases of the development of the organism or with processes that involves the maintenance of this, or be a pathological process, which never is programmed and occurs after cellular injury or when it has involvement of the hemostasis. The apoptosis process is extremely important in the development, hemostasis, control of neoplasia and in the functions of the immune system, beyond the removal of defective, injured or reactive cells in excess. Apoptosis is a process in which the cell dies by programmed form without the presence of inflammation. There are evidences that all the animal cells express constituently the proteins necessary to promote apoptosis, a complex process that involves a variability of signaling ways that take multiple changes in the cell in death process. The cell death is associated with the renewal of damaged cells or cells that do not receive support from its microenvironment (survival factors). In the course of the immune response, the cell death mainly neutralizes excessive clonal expansion for two mechanisms: privation of factors of growth and for the Activation-Induced Cell Death (AICD).