In a recent issue of Trends in Plant Science, Andrew J. Love et al. [1] provided an interesting point of view regarding regulatory overlap between apoptotic-like and autophagic programmed cell death (PCD). Taking into account that the two forms of cell death share cytological and biochemical features, the authors reasonably hypothesized that they might also possess a common set of molecular regulators. The authors further postulated that the nature of the stimuli would determine the cell death rate and, consequently, whether apoptotic-like (rapid) or autophagic (slow) PCD would be engaged. Although we do acknowledge that the overall analysis is valuable and original, we became concerned when autophagy was described as the process responsible for cell demise during ‘autophagic PCD’ (see Box 1 and Glossary in Ref. [1]). Historically, autophagic cell death, also known as type II cell death, has been defined using morphological criteria: it was characterized by the lack of chromatin condensation anda massive autophagic vacuolization of the cytoplasm [2]. Therefore, this definition does not mention any causative role for autophagy in the cell death process. Furthermore, even though the term ‘autophagic cell death’ might intuitively imply such an idea, to our knowledge this has not yet been demonstrated in plants.
展开▼
机译：在最近一期的《植物科学趋势》中，Andrew J. Love等人。 [1]提供了关于凋亡样细胞死亡和自噬程序性细胞死亡（PCD）之间调节重叠的有趣观点。考虑到两种细胞死亡形式具有细胞学和生化特征，因此作者合理地假设它们也可能具有一组共同的分子调节剂。作者进一步推测，刺激的性质将决定细胞的死亡率，因此，将参与凋亡样（快速）或自噬（慢）PCD。尽管我们确实承认总体分析是有价值的和原始的，但当我们将自噬描述为“自噬PCD”期间导致细胞死亡的过程时，我们感到关注（参见专栏1和参考文献[1]中的术语表）。历史上，已经使用形态学标准定义了自噬细胞死亡，也称为II型细胞死亡：其特征是缺乏染色质浓缩和细胞质大量自噬空泡[2]。因此，该定义没有提及自噬在细胞死亡过程中的任何致病作用。此外，尽管“自噬细胞死亡”一词在直觉上可能暗示了这种想法，但据我们所知，这尚未在植物中得到证实。
展开▼
