Antiviral walls

Repairing for death he targets of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) determine their own mode of death, say Dennis Keefe, Judy Lieberman, and colleagues (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA). The dying cells patch themselves up so that rapid and messy necrosis is avoided in favor of a more lengthy and controlled apoptosis. The CTLs deliver their insult in the form of perforin, a pore-forming protein that helps get proteases called granzymes into the target cell. The Boston group showed that perforin addition to a target cell induced a Ca 2 transient and a massive plasma membrane repair response. Similar Ca 2 -induced responses, in which lysoT