[EvaH (OP)]

Paul wants to know:

If I have a petri dish of human cells and I wanted to determine at what point of time a cell was going to commit suicide, is there something that cells give out (e.g. a colour or a frequency) that could be monitored to do this? Once that change is noted, how difficult (I imagine very difficult) would it be to determine the before and after states of chemical interactions to figure out what was the mechanism behind apoptosis? I assume this is what lots of folk are trying to figure out now. What is the latest in their research?

Can you help?

[evan_au]

You could start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis
It also has some colored photos of the process (but if I understand correctly, the colors represent cell thickness)...

[Rahi Kapoor]

Apoptosis is just one of a number of Programmed Cell Death pathways which occur in animals and other cells as a consequence of a variety of stimuli including stress and social signals and it plays essential roles in morphogenesis and immune defense. It is somewhat more complicated than merely facilitating the death of a cell. The machinery of apoptosis is well conserved among animals and it is composed of caspases (the proteases which execute cell death), adapter proteins (caspase activators), Bcl-2 family proteins and Inhibitor of Apoptosis Proteins (IAPs). Programmed Cell Death is essential for the life cycle of many organisms. Cell death in multicellular organisms can occur as a consequence of massive damage (necrosis) or in a controlled form, through engagement of diverse biochemical programs. It is likely that Apoptosis originated as part of a host defense mechanism as there exists similarities between the protein complexes (that I described, above) which mediate apoptosis (apoptosomes) and complexes involved in immunity: inflammasomes.

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