BCL-2 family members and the mitochondria in apoptosis
- Departments of Pathology and Medicine, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115 USA; The Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10021 USA
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
The BCL-2 family
A variety of physiological death signals, as well as pathological cellular insults, trigger the genetically programmed pathway of apoptosis (Vaux and Korsmeyer 1999). Apoptosis manifests in two major execution programs downstream of the death signal: the caspase pathway and organelle dysfunction, of which mitochondrial dysfunction is the best characterized (for reviews, see Green and Reed 1998; Thornberry and Lazebnik 1998). As the BCL-2 family members reside upstream of irreversible cellular damage and focus much of their efforts at the level of mitochondria, they play a pivotal role in deciding whether a cell will live or die (Fig. ).
The founder of this family, the BCL-2 proto-oncogene, was discovered at the chromosomal breakpoint of t(14;18) bearing human B-cell lymphomas. The BCL-2 family of proteins has expanded significantly and includes both pro- as well …