Programmed cell death

Key Takeaways

hi my name is Barbara Conrad and I'm a professor of biology at the Ludwick maximilan University Munich I was trained as a biochemist and geneticist and for the last 20 years I have been trying to figure out how cells die many cells die in our body every day about 60 billion these 60 billion cells give way to new cells and this is really important to maintain cell your homeostasis and therefore a healthy body when I tell people that I work on Cell death they often ask whether preventing cells from dying would prevent aging and make us live forever but no preventing cells from dying would not prevent us from Aging in contrast it would make us very ill that's because it is very important that our body can remove unwanted cells such as cells that have been damaged to give you an example exposure to too much sunlight can damage the DNA in our skin cells these damaged skin cells need to be removed otherwise skin cancer could develop cell death is also very important during development through cell death cells that were formed in excess are removed and the body and its organs are shaped and sculpted my favorite example during development is the webs of skin between our fingers in utero human Fe PES have skin between their fingers and toes but this skin is removed through cell death before birth what will the cause programmed cell death be about in the course I will focus on one particular form of programmed cell death and that is apoptosis I will take a historical perspective of the research in the apoptosis field and use that to teach you about the molecular Machinery that kills cells in a programmed manner the apop Tois field is a great example of how different experimental approaches have led to the identification of different components of one and the same molecule machinery and therefore complemented each other very well these different experimental approaches were genetic biochemical and cell biological approaches and the models used by human tumors nematode worms and human cell lines I will discuss critical experiments that really Advance the field and I will discuss the questions that the field is currently working on throughout the course I will also discuss how our knowledge of selth has increased our understanding of various diseases and how this will ultimately help to develop novel Therapeutics what is required to take the course of course you should be interested in learning about programmed selde you should also be curious about how we know what we know about program cell death and finally a basic understanding of genetics and molecu and cell biology would be advantageous