روش‌های بررسی آپوپتوز

Background and Objective: Apoptosis or programmed cell death is an important process for cellular homeostasis and it can be initiated by both physiologic and pathologic stimuli. Defects in the apoptosis process may lead to serious disease such as autoimmune diseases, cancer, tumors drug resistance, and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Various methods such as cytotoxicity assay, morphological evaluation, DNA laddering, TUNEL assay and flow cytometry analysis have been used to study cellular apoptosis. The selection of particular method depends on the cell system, the nature of cell death inducer, the information that is being sought and the technical restriction. In this review, various methods to study apoptosis have been discussed. Key words: Apoptosis, Cell death, Flow cytometry, DNA fragmentation