Blocking apoptosis prevents blindness in Drosophila retinal degeneration mutants

Florence F. Davidson and Hermann Steller ()
Additional contact information
Florence F. Davidson: National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute
Hermann Steller: Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nature, 1998, vol. 391, issue 6667, 587-591

Abstract: Abstract Apoptosis is a gene-directed form of cell death that is essential for normal development and health. Yet abnormally high levels of apoptosis are linked to many degenerative diseases1. Some important biochemical events in apoptosis have been identified2, but the therapeutic utility of blocking cell death remains unclear. An important question in this regard is whether cells rescued from apoptosis can function. We have investigated the mechanism of cell death in two Drosophila mutant strains that exhibit age-related retinal degeneration. One of these mutations also occurs in humans, where it causes retinitis pigmentosa. We found that retinal cell death in rdgC and ninaERH27/+ flies occurred by apoptosis and was blocked by eye-specific expression of the baculoviral cell survival protein p35. Most importantly, the mutant flies expressing p35 showed significant retention of visual function. The results demonstrate a therapeutic benefit of late-stage inhibition of apoptosis to flies, and suggest that similar results may be obtained in higher organisms.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35385 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:391:y:1998:i:6667:d:10.1038_35385

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35385

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().