In the freshwater cnidarian polyp Hydra, cell death takes place in multiple contexts. Indeed apoptosis occurs during oogenesis and spermatogenesis, during starvation, and in early head regenerating tips, promoting local compensatory proliferation at the boundary between heterografts. Apoptosis can also be induced upon exposure to pro-apoptotic agents (colchicine, wortmannin), upon heat-shock in the thermosensitive sf-1 mutant, and upon wounding. In all these contexts, the cells that undergo cell death belong predominantly to the interstitial cell lineage, whereas the epithelial cells, which are rather resistant to pro-apoptotic signals, engulf the apoptotic bodies. Beside this clear difference between the interstitial and the epithelial cell lineages, the different interstitial cell derivatives also show noticeable variations in their respective apoptotic sensitivity, with the precursor cells appearing as the most sensitive to pro-apoptotic signals. The apoptotic machinery has been well conserved across evolution. However, its specific role and regulation in each context are not known yet. Tools that help characterize apoptotic activity in Hydra have recently been developed. Among them, the aposensor Apoliner initially designed in Drosophila reliably measures wortmannin-induced apoptotic activity in a biochemical assay. Also, flow cytometry and TUNEL analyses help identify distinctive features between wortmannin-induced and heat-shock induced apoptosis in the sf-1 strain. Thanks to the live imaging tools already available, Hydra now offers a model system with which the functions of the apoptotic machinery to maintain long-term homeostasis, stem cell renewal, germ cell production, active developmental processes and non-self response can be deciphered.
KEY WORDS: apoptosis, aposensor, DNA fragmentation, caspase inhibitors, flow cytometry
Apoptosis occurs in multiple contexts in HydraNew advances in the field of cell death continuously contribute to show the deep intricacy of the apoptotic machinery with a variety of cell behaviors and developmental processes (Yi and Yuan, 2009;Fuchs and Steller, 2011;Miura, 2011). Indeed knockout and knockdown based studies performed in well-established model organisms such as nematodes, flies and mice provided us with detailed information about the molecular actors that guide the interactions between cell death and cell survival, cell death and cell proliferation, cell death and cell differentiation. However these model systems despite their fabulous genetic potency provide restricted conditions to study these interactions (Podrabsky and Krumschnabel, 2010). Therefore, given the conservation of the apoptotic machinery since basal metazoans (Srivastava et al., 2010) and the multiple impact of cell death in complex cellular and developmental processes, there is a need to extend our focus Int. J. Dev. Biol. 56: 593-604 (2012) doi: 10.1387/ijdb.123499sr Abbreviations used in this paper: AO, acridine orange; APAF1, apoptotic protease activating factor 1; Bcl-2, B-cell lymph...