Drosophila Apoptosis and Bcl-2 Genes: Outliers Fly in

After much speculation (Abrams 1999; McCall and Steller 1997; Meier and Evan 1998), work described in this issue of The Journal of Cell Biology and in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Igaki et al. 2000) unveils the long anticipated, missing piece of the apoptosome in flies. On page 703 in this issue, in a paper by Colussi et al., Kumur, Richardson, and colleagues characterize the first Drosophila members of the Bcl-2 gene family whose function is important for programmed cell death (PCD). The founding member of this gene family was identified as the proto-oncogene upregulated by t(14;18) translocations in B cell follicular lymphomas. Since this discovery, and its link to the regulation of cell death, the Bcl-2 family of proteins has...